The Defender Of The Faith : ; :

The Defender Of The Faith : ; :

PART V

THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH

PART V

THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH

I MIGHT call this part ""Defender of His Faith." It was Wesley's own faith that he had to defend practically from the start of the Methodist Movement.

I repeat what I have said so many times before: that we cannot understand Wesley without keeping in mind what he was driving at. He was trying to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land, and to do it, not directly through a Church, but through a society.

He was himself the head and front of that society.

"That means that he could not rely on official church support.

Indeed, until toward the close of his career, he got from the Church not support but indifference and even hostility.

'The questions about the interpretations of doctrine raised by Methodists were addressed to him.

The questions were taken up in Conference sessions, but the answers came chiefly from Wesley.

To be sure, Wesley pronounced his judgments within the framework of the doctrines of the English Church, but he had to pass on problems that were virtually new.

English Churchmen, for example, were opposed to and even scandalized by the emotional uproar of the Wesleyan meetings.

'They were offended by the positiveness of the professions of assurance of salvation which abounded in the Methodist testimony.

Neither Susanna Wesley nor Samuel Wesley, Jr., had had any such definite forms of assurance as those to which the Wesleyan converts laid claim.

Virtually all the problems affecting experience came at last to Wesley for decision, and he had to meet them alone.

It does not take much away from the burden of the task to say that Wesley would not have shared any authority of any kind with anyone; that does not change our opinion about the weight he carried.

The conduct of the Methodist societies meant at least fifty years of controversy for Wesley, controversy which began after the return from Georgia; indeed, which started even before the departure for Georgia if we remember that, as a member of the Holy Club at Oxford, he had to defend the Club against all manner of misunderstanding and misinterpretation and calumny.

'The warfare of which I am thinking, however, had to do with Wesley's preaching and teaching to the societies.

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May I say at the outset that it would have been hard to show any more genuine faith in a democratic principle than did Wesley in bringing forward such doctrines as those of assurance and Christian perfection for the acceptance of the masses of persons, of all sorts and conditions, who formed the host of his followers.

'There is a parallel in the publication of the English Bible for the people of England, or for all who could read. We cannot blame the Roman

Catholic Church for feeling that it was dangerous to open the Scriptures to the peoples, except as those Scriptures were interpreted by officials of the Church.

The possibilities of misunderstanding seemed appalling to the leaders of the Roman Church.

The possibilities too became actualities in innumerable instances. To throw the Scriptures, with all their mysteries, broadcast before multitudes of men who could, at the best, only half read, who were full of superstition—or at least the germs of superstition—was an act of stupendous faith both in God and man.

From the point of view of ordinary matter-of-fact common sense, the precautions of the Roman Church had much to commend them.

Similarly with Wesley's preaching of the various stages of assurance, or reliance on inner experience. To go out to the crossroads, and the fields, and the market places with a message that had in it the emotional possibilities which his had was from the angle of careful prudence reckless and almost foolhardy.

It meant that Wesley had not only to overcome the hostility of the crowds, of which we have already spoken, but the excesses produced by the reactions of the nervously unstable.

'There is also around the edges of any widespread popular movement what Theodore Roosevelt used to call a lunatic fringe. Wesley coolly matched himself against all this. He must have known that the excesses would appear, for they had appeared before in popular religious excitements in England.

'The Wesleyan Revival was not the first in English history to be accompanied by emotional extravagance.

There is room for holding that Wesley was probably the first leader of his type of mind and training to scrutinize these phenomena so carefully, to see if there might be anything of value in them.

It is a question as to whether he did not go too far in this intellectual, virtually scientific, hospitality.

Whatever response to these characteristics Wesley made, however, was almost wholly of the mind.

There is not anything to suggest that he was caught in them himself.

Take the case of Thomas Maxfield.

Maxfield was one of Wesley's converts who showed at first extraordinary ability as a lay preacher. Mrs, Susanna

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Wesley had been much impressed by his preaching and had urged John to send him forth as an evangelist.

All went well for a time, but Maxfield soon revealed that he had notions of his own, especially about Christian perfection.

In one of the most direct letters ever written by one Christian to another, Wesley tried to show

Maxfield the error of his ways. The letter is long, but I quote a few passages, with particular emphasis on Wesley's word about Maxfield's not showing much of a spirit of love, the characteristic failing of those who think they have attained to perfection in love. Iam not so much concerned here with Wesley's statements themselves as with their spirit—a temper of complete mastery, mastery of himself, and assumed mastery of the man to whom he is writing. 'There is not a trace of petulance or irritation, certainly not an item that suggests that Wesley did not know exactly what he was about. Wesley did not resort to the common practice of "viewing with alarm."

He was not affrighted, or even worried. He told Maxfield what was what in language that could not be mistaken, and yet did so without uttering a syllable at which any one acting in good faith could take offense.

Canterbury, November 2, 1762 .

. I dislike your littleness of love, to your brethren and to your own society, your want of union of heart with them... ; your want of meekness, gentleness, long-suffering; your counting every man your enemy that reproves or admonishes you in love; your bigotry and narrowness of spirit.

This is enough, though there are marks of kindly interest on the part of the writer.

Thomas Maxfield was holy in his own mind and had become intolerable.

Wesley was partly to blame for having encouraged qualities in him which were good in the green and pestiferous in the dry. Of course, humanly considered, complete mastery like that of Wesley is more maddening to the one addressed than would be a loss of temper.

Wesley, however, was true to himself.

He took his own leadership as not to be questioned.

I pause over this self-assurance of Wesley again and again.

The longer one reads, the more the marvel grows.

Let us try to keep before us, not how Wesley's situation appears to us now but how it appeared to him then.

These various types of extremists, against whom it was necessary to guard the Wesleyan movement, were all claiming to receive messages from the Lord.

They were

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bearing witness in the fashion that Wesley himself had preached and encouraged.

It must have been sorely puzzling to them to have Wesley sitting in judgment on what they supposed, accepting the principles of Wesley himself, had come to them from a divine source.

Think, though, of the problem for Wesley. He had stood against the wisest judgment of his time in his attitude toward extraordinary claims in the expectation that he could find in them channels for the divine:

What would be the effect if he should prove widely mistaken?

He believed also that some of the channels were from the devil.

Over them all he kept a cool watch, insisting upon doing his own interpreting.

As to the messages that came along the line of what he was teaching on the loftiest spiritual state, he was markedly critical.

On his own theory a man might have achieved Christian perfection, but he placed the utterances of the perfect in about the same scales as other messages when he came to assessing their values, and he always assessed their values.

A further indication of his mastery was his patience in dealing with the aberrant, and eccentric, and extreme.

He could speak definitely, as he did to Maxfield, but he would not too summarily tell any man of this type that there was not any place for him in the society.

Expulsions, highhanded or otherwise, had little place in Wesley's policy. He would indeed drop names from lists until the surviving number was not more than a third of the records with which he started, but that was chiefly of those who had already dropped themselves. Read his Journal and his Letters through and, while we find concern at the lot of those who were getting off the track, we come upon no distrust of his own dealing leniently with them.

More dangerous than Thomas Maxfield was George Bell, another convert who got beyond all control in fanaticism.

This was the man who announced that the world would come to an end ona given date, and had hosts of Methodists in terror until the day had passed. Wesley did everything he could to keep his people quiet, and succeeded, though at considerable effort.

He adopted in all such situations the wise method of avoiding everything that would in the faintest degree suggest the persecution of the disturbing brother.

Fanatics usually court persecution, but they could not get it from Wesley. His method was that of persuasion, of willingness to discuss.

Here, indeed, there is somewhat of irony in the actual fact. Anybody who knew Wesley knew that the persuasion would all be on one side, if there were any.

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All the extremists and fanatics apart, however, Wesley had to meet and contend with a variety of opinions and beliefs and doctrines in such wise as to make his course instructive for times other than his own, for some of the problems raised are perennially recurring.

We have seen that early in the history of Methodism Wesley had to deal with quietism like that of the Moravian brethren.

Quietism meant that the soul left everything to God, despising all means, even the means of grace.

This all seems absurd to us now, but it did not seem so to the seekers of grace in Wesley's day. We can say outright that the means of grace have as their sole purpose to put us into communion with God, but we have to get back to the atmosphere through which the quietists looked at these means.

Incidentally, the ecclesiastical religion of the time had come to regard the means as ends in themselves, just as under some conditions men do today.

Even Wesley himself looked upon the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as having an efficacy suggestive of the Roman view, though, of course, he merely implied this, and would not have stated it in so many words.

Quietism can be so phrased as to seem the height of faith in God, as if it were an absolute surrender to him and waiting upon him, a waiting for him to take the initiative.

We see some things more clearly now than believers did then.

Quietism could not then be waved to one side as we might do today.

Let us remember that in all these central problems of religion the earnest seekers did not get much help from the Established Church.

They got some help but not much.

Wesley had to find his way along pretty much alone.

What saved him and his cause was a peculiar, indefinable good sense: an instinct for the right path. Probably this could be called a feeling for the practical consequences, an anticipation of what the consequences would be.

Where there was no opportunity for consequences to declare themselves, Wesley could, like his contemporaries, give himself to follies.

Nothing could exceed the vigor with which he pronounced in favor of witchcraft. He thought that giving up witchcraft would be giving up the Bible.

He became quite excited when anyone doubted the supernatural nature of the noises in his boyhood heard in the Epworth Rectory. Witchcraft, however, was not cutting any large figure in Wesley's day, and the Epworth noises lasted only a few months and then were heard no more.

If his followers by hundreds had begun practically to accept witchcraft and to cultivate intercourse with ghosts, Wesley

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might not have been so positive on such themes; or perhaps his positiveness would have been on the other side.

Wesley was not afraid to break with groups that could not or would not abide by his teaching.

He was slow to cast out from the society any who did not believe in his doctrines, but he carried his own followers away from organized connection with the Moravians, and he allowed groups that would not follow him to take their departure.

It may seem distressing to note the long line of broken friendships in Wesley's life, but that line is a witness to a grim leadership that could see a course and hold to it.

A second taxing problem which confronted Wesley was that of leading his adherents over the narrow strip of theological territory between Calvinism and antinomianism.

Wesley made in this connection his famous remark to the effect that Methodism is but a hairsbreadth from Calvinism on the one hand, and from antinomianism, on the other.

At the present hour there is quite a noticeable effort to show that Wesley was a Calvinist, and the above remark is quoted as all but decisive. 'Those who thus use the quotation should quote also the antinomianism reference.

What the passage meant was just what it said, but it implied also that antinomianism and Calvinism were about equally abhorrent to Wesley.

Antinomianism came out of the emphasis on faith. "Works" have no value in the sight of God, as works in themselves.

A man cannot earn his way, or pay his way to salvation by what he does.

In this emphasis Wesley, of course, was trying to hold fast the inner reliance on Christ as the path to the soul's life, but he could not help overstating his teaching, due in part to the obvious limitation that he could not say more than one thing in the same breath, and that he was given to making his statements so strong that, taken by themselves, they seemed to stand alone. What Wesley said and did at one instant has to be set in a wide circle of context if we would get his full idea, and even then may not altogether fit into the context.

Most of the difficulty as to disparagement of good works was due to the morally empty and yet formally correct religious practices of official ecclesiasticism. Then, of course, anything that men did would seem to fall short of what God would expect. The Methodists of that day were desperately afraid that men's works might have some merit in their own right.

As a matter of fact, men's good deeds have always had merit on their own account. We all feel that the good and the true and the beautiful are meritorious just as they are.

Granted that they fall

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short of the ideal in any particular manifestation, they are worthy as far as they go. Take Wesley's own life. Wesley would have said, indeed did say, that whatever worth his work had was due to the grace of God, the unmerited favor of God. Put just thus the human virtue is obscured altogether and confusion is at hand. When Wesley was pressed for theological opinion, he would say that the good works of any and all were filthy rags. Taking him as a man among men, he enjoyed good works as heartily as any.

Wesley had a peculiarity—a most annoying one to a reader of his Journal— of apparently being caught up into admiration of whatever might be fine or beautiful in a landscape or a building and of almost unconsciously breaking forth into applause, and then of catching himself and asking what was the use of all this anyway, inasmuch as it all had to be burned up at the last day. It almost seems as if Wesley was determined not to enjoy anything, but that he did enjoy fineness, and then brought in, lugged in by the ears, some somber reflections about the end of all things. He did enjoy the good and the beautiful until he thought that perhaps he ought not.

Now, the antinomians were logical enough in their way. They concluded that, if good works were worthless, they did not count more effectively in any direction than evil works, and evil works therefore made no considerable difference.

So, if one had enough faith in God, one could do as one pleased. The logic was correct enough. What could be more suggestive of a right heart than com- — plete reliance upon God, to the neglect of all effort to do anything on one's own account?

If one had attained to Christian perfection, one had a right to expect that anything that came into one's mind would be pure.

Here again Wesley had to fall back upon his indefinable good sense.

In doing this he had to take his stand, and just say so.

Perhaps it would be fair to say that almost all these extremes and aberrations came because the Methodists fell into seizing only one fragment of the truth and overworking it.

'The supreme quality of a genuine leader is the ability not only to see truth steadily, but to see it whole.

Wesley's sanity consisted largely in just this ability to get all the factors bearing on religious experience into his field of view.

He did not always have the factors in the true perspective, or right relation to one another, but he did better here than any other man of his age.

How odd it would have been if he had really disparaged good works? He himself put forth a total of energy in work which re-

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mains today, and will likely remain while men study such subjects at all, one of the most arresting of human phenomena.

Here was a man working at top speed through over sixty years.

Yet he had to remind his followers that there was just a shade of distance from Methodism over into antinomianism.

By the way, if we wish to see how current is the tendency to this practical heresy, we can find illustration, not indeed in the Church at the present day, but in some circles of those who are so genuinely devoted to social service, and thoroughgoing social service at that, as to justify themselves in all manner of indulgences in their own private lives.

If these persons were to declare that their personal conduct is their own, and that they will take the consequences of what they do, nobody on the outside could say much; but they often speak as did the antinomians of old, avowing that they are so wholeheartedly devoted to a service, which is for them the highest religion, that they can do what they please in their own individual affairs.

I am not attempting to offer critical judgment in these instances, but I am saying that, while the content of such avowed devotion to an ideal is far different from eighteenth-century antinomianism, the spirit and temper are enough akin to what

Wesley had to meet to render that type at least intelligible to us.

The main highways to mistake in religious thinking are much the same throughout the centuries, but grass grows over them and blurs their edges, or change of name makes them seem different, till they bring the wayfarer out into the old disaster.

As to the other side of Wesley's statement, the smallness we have to recognize in the difference between Methodism and Calvinism was at the point of freedom of human choice.

Calvin had compelling influence on English religious thought at and after the Reformation.

The background of Wesley's thinking was close to the main ideas of Calvinism.

For example, Wesley accepted the idea that man's life was planned by God throughout. What men had to do was to find the plan and say "Amen" toit. Wesley's idea of freedom did not mean that men could defy God and wreck the divine plans by that defiance, except to the extent of disastrous consequences to themselves.

Probably the comment of a noted follower of Wesley says as well as can be said what the freedom of the Wesleyan type involves, namely, that men can recognize the plan of God and say "Amen" to it, and go along with it, or they can say "No" and be dragged along. That is to say, apart from the choices of men, God is to have his way.

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As to the consequences, he will not allow them to wreck his plans for his universe.

Now, this indeed is not pure Calvinism, but it is Calvinistic, predestination, even, and can be softened down into preplanning.

The late Professor B. H. Streeter showed us anew that the dignity spoken into human life by Calvinism was not the result of fatalism, or determinism.

If a man feels that he is the plaything of the Fates, he can do nothing better than to act as the Mohammedan does: shrug his shoulders and take what comes.

If he feels that he is the outcome of materialistic forces, he may seek to adjust those forces as far as he can to his own satisfaction, or he can adjust himself to them, or he can make a gesture of defying them if he feels that there is any reason in defying an impersonal process. Calvinistic predestination means plan. If the test of a belief is the life that it produces, Calvinism can point to justifying character-effects both in individuals taken separately and in their social relationships.

It puts plan into the universe and an iron plan at that.

Wesley believed in as stern a plan for the universe as did Calvin.

More than that, Wesley went a noticeable distance toward Calvinistic predestination.

He was hospitably inclined to the notion that God could and possibly did now and again predestine some souls to lives of righteousness. That is to say, he was willing to entertain the possibility of predestination on the side of foreordination to righteousness.

Logically, this seems to give Wesley's case away.

In such predestination to moral righteousness Wesley seems to imply that the human will in these exceptional characters is quiescent, or acquiescent, so that the problem of free choice does not arise. The most that can be said is that God so fashions some lives that they always will to do right, but in strict logic this does not help us much. There is no use trying to dodge the predestination aspect of some phases of Wesley's view. On the positive side some souls are predestined to eternal bliss.

'The difference between Wesley and Calvin here seems to be that Calvin would hold

- that such foreordination was the essence of his system, while Wesley held it as only occasional and exceptional and on the side of foreordained goodness.

It was over freedom of choice that Wesley stood against Calvinism.

I have spoken of the logic of Calvin's system. My remark was provisional only. If we take Calvinism strictly, and make freedom of choice impossible, there is no logic init.

For, if there is no choice in conduct, there is no choice in thinking. To be sure, this

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is not determinism, for Calvinism reserves to God, or grants to God outright, the power to choose.

So far as Calvinists can say, God has chosen certain persons for eternal bliss and certain others for eternal woe—all to his own glory. There is no choice for men themselves, however.

'That being so, there is no power of choice among their thoughts. The Calvinist thinks Calvinism because of the divine decree, and the anti-Calvinist thinks anti-Calvinism because of a divine degree.

Wesley fought mightily for the freedom of man's will, but not primarily on logical grounds.

He did not add anything substantial to anti-Calvinistic reasoning as such.

He fought for the dignity of man and for the honor of God. He cared with all there was of him both for man and God. As we shall have opportunity to see later, he so stood for the worth of man as to make that worth one of the important foundation stones of modern democracy.

As to the idea of God, he wrought forcefully in making that idea profoundly moral.

It is customary with theologians, especially with those in whom there lingers a heritage of prejudice against Methodism, to maintain that Wesley, and the Methodism which he founded, did not make any important contribution to theological thinking.

It may be so, but Wesley pushed into the foreground some considerations of which religious teachers must take account.

He played his part in making the idea of God moral.

Calvinism has always had much to say about the stiffest and sternest morality, and then has left God to do as he pleased.

Of course Calvinism as such came of a time which was used to the idea of absolute power inrulership.

It did much, indeed, to break down the claim of absolute rule for the Pope.

It would have been shocked to hear God spoken of as a pope, but it accepted the idea of kingship and was lenient toward the notion that a king could do no wrong.

At any event, it welcomed the idea of absoluteness in God's rule.

Moreover, actions speak louder than words. When Calvin himself got virtually absolute power over Geneva, he made a sorry exhibition of what he claimed as theocracy. 'The God of Calvin was not moved by any moral claims that at all suggested the humane or the human.

It was at this joint in the Calvinistic armor that Wesley aimed his shafts. To borrow the phrase of one of his nineteenth-century followers, he sought to make the old idea of God tolerable, though admittedly he did not wholly succeed.

His idea as well as Calvin's partook of cruelty probably inevitable in as legally savage an age as the eighteenth century.

If he had tried to preach only to those

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who, like himself, could not find the God of Calvin worthy of acceptance, he would never have been able to bring more than a small minority of them within sound of his voice.

It is easy to point to the marked influence of a leader like Calvin, numbering adherents by the hundreds of thousands.

This does not settle all the question, however.

If Calvinism won its adherents and then left a field clear for systems of a different type, we should have one situation; but we have quite another when it set other hundreds of thousands against itself.

It will not do, either, to say that Calvinism is not a religious system for weaklings. Weaklings are as likely as others to take to an iron system.

'They realize their need of its positiveness and grasp it in a frenzy of desperation.

On the other hand, the strong, independent soul may be the one most likely violently to reject Calvinism. Certainly, those of richness and fullness of human qualities are likely to reject it.

John Wesley could not be called a weakling, but he would have none of the Calvinism which left out freedom of choice for men.

I repeat that he was quite as much concerned for the character of God as for the dignity of man.

He was willing to accept the poetry of Cowper, who at one time knew what evangelical experience meant, that God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform; he was, indeed, ready to adjust himself to all manner of mystery, but he would not cloak the barbarity of God's sending men to eternal doom without moral fault of their own by calling the divine decrees mysterious.

'To Wesley such decrees added nothing to any glory of a God worth worshiping.

All this is relevant to the present hour because of attempts which are current to bring back an emphasis on Calvinism, though it goes by another name.

It may be that we cannot fairly say that much theology of the twenty years since the World War takes away the freedom of man as did Calvinism, but it does take rationality out of man's actions, so that the sole duty seems to be to find what God wants and todo that. This would indeed be the sum of duty if the - moral example of God were the ideal; but if God is conceived of as dictator, setting forth his own will because it is his own will, the process of producing a moral idea of God, which we fondly hoped was moving forward, is estopped. We can have an adequate God, adequate to individual and social tasks, and at the same time a God of moral love. This it was for which Wesley contended.

There are various ways of depriving man of freedom. He may be created without the possibility of free choice, as John Calvin and

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later Jonathan Edwards seemed to imply; or he can be set in a realm of force where orders simply have to be obeyed. The penalty for disobedience may become so great, so out of proportion to wrong done, that the man who disobeys may take on moral heroism. I once knew a believer in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures who used to admit most cheerfully that one can accept that belief, or refuse it, just as one pleases; but if one refuses, one will be damned!

Against all conceptions which would deprive men of a measure of freedom which would make the choice real, Wesley waged war.

Here was no foe on the outside, but one within the camp of Methodism itself.

The fight was desperate and grim, with Whitefield supported by the Countess of Huntingdon, and Wesley with the main group of the Methodists.

Wesley showed far better temper than did his opponents.

He would not break with Whitefield personally. When some of the supporters of Whitefield distributed at the door of the chief preaching place of Wesley in London some scurrilous attacks on Wesley's doctrines, Wesley went out, gathered up what he could, and tore them up, remarking as he did so that, if Mr. Whitefield were in Wesley's place, he would do just as he,

Wesley, was doing.

No man could have watched his own lips more carefully during those days of the Calvinistic controversy than did Wesley. 'The attacks on Wesley by Toplady and Rowland Hill did not disturb him much.

'To be called an old fox who had been run to earth would have excited a smaller man.

Wesley was big enough practically to ignore all these outrages.

Perhaps his consciousness of his own strength helped him. The truth is that the Calvinists were seriously put to it in order to meet, not Wesley's formal arguments, but the effectiveness of the preaching based on his doctrines.

Both Toplady and Hill resorted almost to blackguardism because they did not have any other weapons popularly effective.

A further element of weight in Wesley's position was that he realized that the Calvinistic Methodists were not, after all, giants in formal logic. John Wesley seldom forgot what Samuel Wesley, his father, had taught him: that not many issues in this world are determined by logic. All sorts of factors entered into the Calvinistic debate.

'There was the charm of Whitefield's eloquence, and his power of ready adaptation to circumstances.

He could receive and hold slaves for his Georgia orphanage, and preach most eloquently on the dignity of man without any serious mental disturbance over the inconsistency.

He got along famously with the

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Countess of Huntingdon and with those of her circle. Wesley knew his opponents.

He knew the Methodists.

He knew that they were not overmuch concerned with formal theological theorizing though, in spite of all the acrimony, there were discussions of predestination and divine decrees before large Methodist groups which evidently received attentive and appreciative hearing.

As to Whitefield, Wesley was confident that his preaching would win lives to God in spite of the Calvinism.

We have heard much of Wesley's tolerance, but have never done it full justice.

For usually we are tolerant toward views that do not infringe closely upon us.

It is easy, for example, here in America, to take a comfortable attitude toward Mohammedanism or Hinduism. They do not concern us except in an outside, far-away fashion.

Wesley's tolerance was of a wholly different order. He was trying to turn souls to God, and saw in the midst of his own group those who were holding and teaching views which, if logically carried out, would make the gospel of no effect.

He did not seek to crush this movement by banishing Calvinists from his societies. On the other hand, he did not ignore the movement. He openly argued against it. There has been among church leaders at times a species of tact—so-called—which shows itself in the ability to get along with those of opposing views by ignoring those views, or by so stating one's own conceptions as to leave the opponents with the impression that one is more or less in sympathy with them. Wesley resorted to neither of these methods. Remember, he was head of a society and not of a church.

He could have laid down rules for membership in a society which would not have been permissible for a church.

All he had to do was to drop the name of an offending brother from the rolls.

He did repeatedly purge his societies, not for beliefs, but for conduct. He could have excused himself for keeping silent, but he wished his followers to see with wide-open eyes just what Christian discipleship meant.

- He might have said that the mass of his followers were not theologically trained, that they could not follow the intricacies of theological reasoning, that they might lose their way.

He might have kept silent, and have laid stress on the spirit of life in his followers and upon their giving themselves to practical tasks, saying of them that they were persons of "good spirit" or that they were fine workers.

Under such leadership that would have occurred in Methodism which has often come about since: the appearance of a laity practically illiterate so far as concerned religious thinking. No—

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Wesley did not overload his preaching with controversial matter.

He kept the immediate spiritual needs to the fore, but at the same time he did write and speak against the denial of human freedom in Calvinism.

In all the discussion he was careful to hold fast to the Christian spirit.

He did not utter anything which would even offend good taste, to say nothing of his freedom from anything personally offensive to his opponents.

In every way he had the better of it as to the temper of the debate.

In dealing with the arguments themselves he spoke with extreme boldness.

Not only did he declare that he would not worship such a God as the Calvinistic doctrine of divine sovereignty required, but he would have nothing to do with a body of Scripture writings that would give us a Calvinistic God.

If the Scriptures were rightly interpreted by the Calvinists, so much the worse for the Scriptures!

Of course this did not mean that Wesley was becoming "liberal" in his treatment of the Scriptures.

He did not believe the Scriptures could be so interpreted as to deny freedom to men; but, if they could, so much the worse for the Scriptures!

It is possibly worth noting that the Calvinistic group had somewhat of the same characteristics that have always appeared in Calvinistic circles: a tendency away from the main masses of believers.

Calvinism by its nature is a doctrine of privilege.

Calvin has been given credit by some who try to make his system democratic by its placing the individual soul alone in the presence of God, without the need of any intermediary whatever.

So far so good, but the idea of election in itself carries with it the suggestion of a privileged group.

To be sure, the thoroughgoing Calvinist will have it that those who attain eternal bliss attain through no merit of their own, but this will not suffice.

There must be some reason for the divine election. The fact itself that some are elected and others not, makes a difference between men. Indeed, we may not know who are elected, but the old-fashioned Calvinist, to use his own phrase was "'led to indulge a hope." Just how this tended to foster the growth of democracy has never been explained.

Practically, those who did not indulge a hope, and never thought about indulging a hope, were on the outside.

Indulging a hope was not much of a witness to salvation, but, after all, it made a difference.

Who has ever met a Calvinist who was not sure that he was of the elect?

We must not trace too close a connection between religious

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speculation and practical conduct; but any religious system which starts with the idea of God as a dictator, with the divine reasons for granting bliss to some and woe to others so utterly opaque as to prevent men's getting any clues to their meaning, makes for dictatorship in earthly rule, and privileges for special classes.

Of course we must not blame Wesley for not urging against Calvinism an argument about the character of God which would not have been intelligible in a day of absolute power in a ruler.

Did Wesley do wisely in holding fast to Divine Omnipotence?

Would he not have done better to sacrifice omnipotence to love, and teach that God submitted to limitations which genuinely limit omnipotence?

Is it not even conceivable that such limitations are inherent in the Divine Nature?

Another foe which Wesley had to fight was mysticism.

Mysticism is hard to define.

Among many, perhaps most of us who talk of religious experience, it is a general term for the inner life, for the spirit of meditation and prayer. From this angle we do not scruple to call Wesley himself one of the noblest of mystics. Indeed, he is often so spoken of. Wesley, however, says it was mysticism on which he most nearly lost his faith, He read Fénelon, Madame Guyon, Jacob Behmen, William Law.

From the manner in which he speaks of them, one would not suspect the force they had exerted upon him. Without attempting any formal definition of mysticism, let us see what it was in Wesley's mind by looking at his attitude toward it. Suffice it to say at the start that we must recognize it as one of the outstanding manifestations of power in the history of the Church, that it has developed through the ages a system of thought and a method of exercise in a search after what it calls a direct and immediate communion with the Divine.

So far as the leaders of mysticism are concerned, it seems to be Behmen who most tried the patience of Wesley, this partly because of the vagueness and haziness with which the mystic wrote.

He could not make much of Behmen, and in this he shared the inability of hundreds of others. 'The general statements of Behmen, the framework of his conceptions—if he can be said to have a frame for his theory—the impression made upon Wesley by reading Behmen was evidently about like that made upon many of us by reading the writings of Christian Science.

It seemed to Wesley to be away up in the air when it was intelligible at all.

In many respects mysticism had characteristics which could have been fitted into Wesleyan experience and interpretation. A

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movement which has had more or less vitality throughout the whole career of Christianity must, of course, express and gratify human needs.

It is a search to get into actual union with God, fundamentally the same search as Wesley's.

The mystic experiences run through somewhat the same stages as those taught by Wesley, notably the periods of the "dark night of the soul" and of final illumination.

Wesley, however, could not endure the passivity which much teaching of mysticism enforced.

At bottom Christian mysticism is not passive, but active, strenuously so.

The mystic seeker must indeed seek, seek as if his life depended upon the finding, and the finding upon the seeking.

It seems, indeed, that there have always been non-Christian elements even in Christian mysticism, these coming chiefly from the Orient.

Hinduism, for example, is passively mystic—whatever the soul seeks tends toward stupefying it into unconsciousness.

There are passages in the Christian mystics which seem to preach a sinking into a form of absorption into the Divine.

—The Hindu experience, however, is poles removed from that of the normal Christian experience, one being a veritable lapse toward unconsciousness, and the other an ineffable exaltation and ecstasy.

Now, Wesley never had the slightest doubt of the reality of direct divine action upon the minds of men, but he did object to the mysticism of his day, the type he saw presented to his followers, on several counts.

As we learn more of what he was, we cannot see how he could have taken any attitude other than the one he did take.

One count was the disregard of means, the expectation of ends without the use of the instruments appropriate to secure the ends.

Another was the tendency to a false waiting upon God, a quietism which cost nothing in exertion. Though he preached the spiritual gifts of the Lord as free, Wesley did feel that all good gifts have to be nevertheless gained by the effort of all the spiritual energies.

So long as the mystics merely referred to their uplifts as ineffable, or inexpressible, Wesley could not say much; but, as soon as they began to translate them into speech, he insisted that there were manifold tests by which the worth of the messages could be judged.

He demanded something more than the testimony that the mystic felt thus and so before he would accept the message as authentic.

He declared that the utterances should square with Scripture and that they should be in line with the Christian con-

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sciousness, at least should be acceptable to the body of believers.

I say "in line with." Wesley certainly did not mean to submit revelations to individual souls to a vote of the believers.

What he meant was that the mystic experience should fit into the outline worked out by experience in the history of the Church, and not be merely peculiar, or aberrant, or eccentric.

Surely, centuries of experience with mystics have shown the wisdom of Wesley's insistence here.

As I have said more than once, Wesley believed and said that religion must be social.

He made it clear that he meant by this more than merely social as manifesting itself in the Christian spirit toward one's neighbors, society being for him not only a field for Christian practice, but also a corrective and re-enforcement of individual experience.

This corrective aim was partly the reason for the class meeting.

It does not do for the saints to live too much in solitude. Nor does it do for them to act too exclusively as their own interpreters of Scripture. The late Josiah Royce, Hegelian as he was in philosophy, once deplored that there was not in his day more of the type of Behmen's preaching. What he referred to was a mystic treatment into which the Hegelian philosophy might have been read. Royce's use of Behmen was suggestive and helpful, but it was far removed from what the Scriptures meant.

Wesley felt that the Scriptures should be read to find what they meant, though it is permissible always for an interpreter to tell us that his exegesis is what the Book suggests to him.

One difficulty with mysticism always has been that, when the mystics have relied upon the Scriptures, they have interpreted the Scriptures in a fashion that the divine authors never could have recognized.

Wesley believed that professed experiences of revelation should be submitted to all available tests.

In some cases he went to the limit of accepting such revelations as genuine, but only after he had asked all relevant questions. I think I can hint at his attitude by telling of a character of whom I knew in my boyhood. An engineer of a locomotive of a passenger train used to say that for the most part he could tell whether all was right with his locomotive without looking at steam gauges, or watercocks, or watches, or timetables.

He could tell whether his train was on time or not by the "swing of the engine." A preacher, hearing of this power, made it a theme for an illustration of the Christian's feeling at home in the universe, "by the swing of things''—the Christian's life being in such adjustment that it did not need to rely upon artificial aids.

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So far as the engineer and the Christian were concerned, they were alike in superiority to all mechanical devices, discerning the rightness and soundness of their relation, one to his engine and the other to the universe, by inner awareness.

This illustration is suggestive for its inadequacy and its adequacy.

It does put us on the path of the realization that there is possible an awareness to truth which is above and to a degree independent of reasons that can be formally stated.

Any artisan, or artist, or scientist, or philosopher 'knows that out of experience comes discernment which bears witness to itself as to nearness to the truth.

In all these realms, however, the awareness arises out of the long practice in life. The judgment of the scientist comes of years of use of all the instruments available for the discovery of truth.

The expert can drive at truth, as we say, directly, because he has been so faithful in the use of the scientific knowledge and skill which has come to him as a social heritage, and because he has so consummately mastered the use of the instruments which are veritable embodiments of the skill of scientists who have labored that others might enter into their labors.

So, for illustration, the scientist becomes aware that a hitherto undiscovered planet is making a disturbance in the distant skies.

Now notice: The suspected star is not hailed as a fact till it has met the tests supplied by the instruments.

'To go back to the more commonplace illustration, the engineer could not be permitted to go for long depending on the "swing of the engine."

One mistake might mean disaster.

He might not be at the top of his physical, especially nervous, fitness.

He might be advancing into years without being aware of the subtlety of the approach of old age.

If he depended on the swing of the engine, he might become a social menace.

There are men who have a rare sense of direction.

In a dense forest, or upon a plain on which there is no landmark, they seem to be able to tell about where they are.

Yet, skillful as they may be, they are reckless beyond everything permissible if they neglect the maps and compasses and any other aids within reach.

The skill to do without these helps in emergency arises from the faithful use of them in daily practice.

A "general" sense of direction, which now and again appears as a "gift'' in an individual, amounts to just about as much in the achievement of the explorer as does a fine voice, which has no training, in the revelation of beauty in song.

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Returning for the moment to the realm of science, we often read in the biographies of scientists that this or that genius suspected a fact long before he could prove it. He knew that what he sought was there as he sought for it. This, by the way, explains the reticence of many a scientific mind about making statements of religious belief.

In a review of a book on physics by a fellow scientist, Bertrand Russell once admitted that most, if not all, scientists cherish "secret beliefs." From the context this seemed to mean beliefs for which they could not give satisfactory proofs to themselves, presumably scientific reasons.

It is to be regretted that more seekers after revelations from God have not been careful to bring their professions to the tests, not only of Scriptures and the church teaching, but to the check and corrective of the larger knowledge of life and mind which we must, more and more, regard as possessing increasing significance for our apprehension of the divine.

Scientific procedure is an extension of the ordinary faculties of the mind.

It seeks, so to speak, to bring more facts within the reach even of the senses and to make it possible to watch them more closely. While, of course, we cannot put the discernment of spiritual realities on the same plane as experimentations with scientific tools, yet both the tools and the spiritual procedures are the outcome of living.

'The instrument in the hands of the physician is the result of careful and sustained effort by those who would make the human touch upon sick flesh more revealing, more efficient, more kindly, more healing. A poetically-minded student of the life of farmers once said that every least detail of a most ordinary-looking plow is the product of age after age of effort of the human will to get better mastery of the earth, till the plow itself is more the expression of human contrivance, and experiment, and struggle than it is of the actual material of which it is fashioned.

So likewise with the forms of prayer, which to Wesley meant so much, with times and seasons of worship and meditation, with the reading of such devotional works as are gathered together in the fifty volumes of the Christian Library.

So also with Wesley's careful study of all religious states which seemed to hint at anything unusual in the ability of men to find God.

Wesley was fundamentally in line with the efforts of all who - would utilize advancing knowledge of the human to learn more about the divine.

Ina day which did not have much but rule of thumb in psychology Wesley had to find his way along the best he could.

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We are confronted in the attitude of Wesley toward mysticism by something of the same condition as confronts us in his stand on Christian perfection.

The background has to be kept in mind. It seemed a simpler matter to make up one's mind on such problems then than today. Wesley lived in a smaller universe than we do.

It gives us something of a shock to read that he did not fully accept the Copernican theory.

The evolutionary hypothesis did not appear till more than a hundred years after the mid-period of his ministry.

The idea of original sin' to a world that accepted an earthly history for man of only about four thousand years was altogether different from that which makes the nature of the individual man the result of forces—physical and psychological—which have been at work for hundreds of thousands of years. 'The present condition is one in which words like "guilt" and "sin" lose the significance they had for the eighteenth century—outside of the range of personal choices—and even there they do not always mean what they then did.

The consequence is that to understand much of what Wesley taught we have to think ourselves back into a thoughtframe which has ceased to be.

It may be remarked in passing that the spiritual gains for our own later time include a healthier feeling for reality, a more charitable attitude toward the frailties of men, a more hopeful assessment of genuine spiritual possibilities.

For Wesley himself the path to communion with God was in doing the divine will. The contrast between the Wesley of Oxford and the Wesley of all-over-England was not in fundamental purpose.

In the Holy Club he had the same purpose as ever after: the search after God, after communion with God, after the highest form of communion possible.

The difference was that in the earlier days he directly sought for such communion through specific exercises.

In the later years he became absorbed in the work of bringing God to his fellow men.

Woodrow Wilson used to say that character is a by-product, that we win character, at least of the highest type, not by deliberately seeking for it, but by losing ourselves in noble tasks.

It would be easy to misuse this wisdom, but it is wisdom nevertheless.

Students of Wesley's Journal and Letters have noted that, as the years went by, the writer spoke less and less of his own spiritual states and more and more of the work that was demanding every ounce of his strength. This is not to be explained by the increase of practical activities, as if Wesley became so busy that he did not any longer have time for meditation and prayer.

Wesley said of himself that he had more time on his hands than

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any other man in England, because of the hours he had to devote to solitary travel.

It was not that he was too busy to seek spiritual graces as would a monk in a cloister; his life was absorbed in the redemption of his fellow men, using the word "redemption" to include all of a man's nature and activities.

This outward gaze in the search for communion with God is not a mere trick by which, after having failed to seize a prize by direct approach, we come upon it from the flank. We are dealing here with one of the fundamentals of the Christian life. No one realized and taught more persistently than did Wesley that Christianity is a religion of the will.

It is not thinking, as such, or feeling, as such; but these as based upon a will set to do righteousness.

This being true, communion with God, even the most mystic vision, has to come from doing the will of God.

Let us assume that one could press on in religious experience till one might behold the face of God, if we may be allowed a grotesque imagining.

Assuming the vision to be true to Christianity, toward what would the gaze of God himself be directed?

Not to the ninety and nine lives already in safety, but to the one still lost. Not to pleased contemplation of him who had found his way to the secret of the Divine Presence, but to the outer circle of those still to be reached.

If God is a seeking God—and what else is there in the New Testament if he is not?

—we see God by looking at the objects toward which he is looking.

The deepest communion with him comes from working together with him.

Now, the sureness of Wesley's religious insight and grasp came out of his labors for men. His thought and feeling and deeds were for them. He kept his feet on the ground. He did not know anything about a philosophy which did not appear till a century after he had died—the pragmatic system. If one wished an illustration, however, of the soundness of the pragmatic method, one could not do better than to read the Journals of Wesley. Every insight to which he attained come directly out of purposeful set of his will.

If Wesley had ever had any doubt about the witness of the Divine Spirit, he never had any reason to doubt the witness of his own spirit.

If anyone, looking on his life from the outside, ever had any doubt about the divineness of the quality of his life, such an onlooker still had to account for the drive of an energy which, in itself, was a unique human phenomenon. One shrewd commentator on early Methodism remarks that John Fletcher had a reputation among the early Methodists for surpassing piety, but that the piety

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necessary to the soul of a Fletcher living in quiet, far from the incessant distraction of administrative duties, did not guarantee the re-enforcement required by Wesley's continuous and complete putting forth of energies.

The indefinable good sense of which I have again and again spoken served Wesley throughout his leadership.

He believed in "guidance," by which he meant the discernment of spiritual] direction which came out of the adjustment of his total life to God's will.

In the instances where he seems to us to have relied upon virtual miracle, as his praying that the cloud might shield his face from the sun while he preached in the open, or that the rain might cease till after the preaching, he seems always careful to ask this help where the issue was of no important consequence.

He could have preached if the sun had been in his face, and he could have ceased preaching during the rain.

Moreover, he could not easily be persuaded to accept a guidance vouched to anyone but himself.

In the main, he kept close to the ideal of religious life and conduct set forth by Jesus.

'The mystic experiences of Jesus are not recorded for us, at least not so as to make them like the experiences of which the professed mystics tell.

Still, there is the immortal summary: we are to love God with all there is of us, heart, mind, soul and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves.

If we look at what seem to be inner experiences of Jesus, we always find that they have to do with the tasks of his career.

Even the temptations of Jesus must have involved deep soul-stirrings out of which came plans for men.

There is not any way by which we can make the experiences of Jesus just visions on their own account.

There are indeed those who tell us, after the old-fashioned interpretation which made all religious experience strictly personal, that the impulse to turn stones into bread was the pressure of the physical appetite, that the call to bow down and worship Satan in return for the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them was the tendency to ambition, that the suggestion to leap from the pinnacle of the Temple was craving to show the favor which Jesus held with his Father.

Where is there in the Gospels any hint that such appeals would have meant anything to Jesus? Judged by his character, what made these feelings temptations at all was their attractiveness as methods for the redemption of Israel.

Wesley found a way which made his leadership compelling.

He threw himself with complete abandonment into his work. The driving motive was love for God and man,

This does not at all

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mean that he reminded himself through all his waking hours that he must show love to God and man.

It did mean that, having given himself to a course which was the best he knew to set forth the highest type of devotion to God and man, he lost himself in the a When men thus lose themselves, the multitudes soon find them.

To sum up, the three foes within Christianity itself which Wesley feared most were Calvinism, Antinomianism, and Mysticism.

Now, each of these three produces a distinct quality of life. Each quality was resistant to the appeals of Methodism.

Here, however, were limitations which made for the strength of Methodism.

The terms just mentioned have today but little of their eighteenth-century meaning.

Wesley had no quarrel with Calvinism except at the point of predestination.

Calvinism stood for a planned life, but Wesley would not accept a plan which left out choice by the lives planned, and left some of the lives outside any pian in the universe, and left no freedom even for the elect. With Wesley the choices of men had to count.

He did not worry overmuch about the future consequences after the honest choice had been made. A discerning student once said that the present-day commonplaceness of Wesley's teaching came out of Wesley's power to make it commonplace by driving it into the mind of his society.

Calvinism has immortal merits, but in its strict logical frame, it would have fastened the iron system of John Calvin upon any widespread growth of the idea of the worth of the individual. When we have said our last word about the despotic sway of Wesley, about his arrogance, and his impatience of those who stood in his way, we have toremember that his coming squarely up against Calvinism so forced the inhuman features of Calvinism out into the light as to make Methodism a power for democracy.

Of course Calvinism in its predestination aspect could not have kept any hold on men at all if it had carried any implications that Calvinists themselves were not among the elect.

This inevitably tended toward making a religious belief a buttress of privilege.

"The English Church all through the eighteenth century courted privilege, reckoned its officials as belonging to the privileged, and naturally enough leaned toward Calvinism. The predestination debate lasted in force, in America at least, till far into the nineteenth century.

It repeatedly comes to renewed force, but in sixty years Wesley saw it settle into a presumably permanent place in Christian thinking, without decisive power of universal appeal.

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The second foe was antinomianism, a notion so absurd that it has all but dropped out of religious thinking: the claim that he who is saved by the merits of Christ does not need to do anything on his own account; that all the good works of men are as nothing in the sight of the Lord anyhow.

So the Christian is free from the law.

Today the man who desires to be free from law does not trouble his head much about religion.

In Wesley's day the stiff Wesleyan standards of moral conduct screened off the morally loosely knit, to say nothing of swarms of fanatics. This could hardly be called a limitation, but this moral rigor marked a field or a path out of which Wesleyanism would not stray.

'Those who have ever had anything to do with the emotional types of religion will realize how closely Wesley had to watch against the depreciation of moral conduct by those who maintained that their redemption was due toa work of Christ like the payment of a price. The debate has faded now from the interest of men, but at one time it brought

Methodism into peril. Wesley through sixty years saw it sink into insignificance as a doctrine.

We have already spoken at length of mysticism.

Here, again, was a danger which, Wesley said, might at one period have wrecked his own religious life.

Mysticism at the present time can be so described as to apply to almost anything religious.

It can mean everything or nothing.

Probably the one point of resemblance in which all shades of mysticism more or less agree is in the belief of direct, unmediated communion of the soul with God. What this means there is no telling, except as one is dealing with a particular mystic, and then there may be no telling.

For a human soul to lose its own individuality and become merged in the Divine Soul is an absurdity.

The human soul might repeat within itself divine experiences, but that is not merging.

The mysticism which seemed dangerous to Wesley was that which put stress on reaching for ends without means.

This also was Wesley's definition of "enthusiasm'"—the search for ends without the use of means.

Now, this also shut Methodism off from some religious groups who might have found place in a Church.

Methodism, according to Wesley, had to be system and plan, or nothing.

He was not striving to make Methodism all-inclusive.

'Throughout his life he was dominated by the idea of a society within a Church.

The three foes I have mentioned—Calvinism, Antinomianism, Mysticism—were points through which a confining circle was drawn.

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Within that circle, developing by its own laws, was Methodism.

One of the enigmas about the times in which Wesley labored was the horror which those of the "upper" classes felt about what they called "enthusiasm."

So far as we can see from looking at contexts in which the term was used, "enthusiasm" referred to anything calculated to arouse the feelings of men at all.

Religion became a careful, prudential course of life without appeal to the emotions.

The most plausible explanation of this antipathy to "enthusiasm" is that the eighteenth century had been preceded by the seventeenth.

With even the most superficial acquaintance with England in the seventeenth century we know the uproar of the nation from the time of Charles I on to the coming of William and Mary. The economists tell us that all the fearful struggles of that distressed century were at bottom economic.

This may be. The discussion, however, had to do with political and religious issues, or with anything which drew the line sharply between those for the established order and those for change.

Whatever economic forces were at work increased the bitterness.

The execution of Charles I released emotional forces in England which have hardly become quiet to this day. The horrible events in Ireland, on the responsibility now of papists and now of Protestants, engendered a rage of which we can form but slight understanding.

Questions like bishops or no bishops, Church or no Church, sacraments or no sacraments, led not merely to fierce debates but to murderous physical fighting. After the terrors of the seventeenth century England desired above all things internal peace. Men were sick of strife, so that the quiet of the eighteenth century came like a blessed boon after the uproar of the seventeenth.

I have already said that Augustine Birrell has reminded us that there were four "purges" of the Church of England by political authority in the two centuries just preceding Wesley, each depriving the Church of many of its finest elements.

At the very mention of religious excitement those who feared most the recurrence of strife became almost beside themselves.

All the power of the established order went to the discouragement of "enthusiasm," which meant anything emotionally upsetting. The conflicts of the seventeenth century had been carried through with tremendous passion and conviction both by Roundheads and Cavaliers.

The sincerity on both sides was but little short of desperate. This conviction and the expressions of it by the men of the seventeenth century seemed to the eighteenth to be

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"enthusiasm" of an extreme degree. Now, it is easy to see that the enthusiasm of the Wesleyan Movement was not of this brand. As we look back to the seventeenth century we see reasons why Wesley did not want the enthusiasm of the Methodists to take political direction.

'The path of safety for Methodism was in its attending strictly to the salvation of the souls of individuals. 'The most serious danger from public opinion that Wesley had to meet was the suspicion that he was a papist.

This became so widespread that once, when in a moment of public excitement against papists all papists were told by the authorities to leave London within the next five days, Wesley gave up important engagements outside

London during that period for fear that leaving the city under the circumstances would be widely construed into an admission that he was a papist.

Like Paul of old, Wesley sought to get into the English courts when mobs attacked him and his followers, so that he might not merely stand upon his legal rights, but that he might prove that he was not starting any "enthusiasm" which would lead to civil disturbance.

When John Nelson, one of Wesley's best preachers, was seized by a press gang taking men for His Majesty's navy, it required all Wesley's skill and energy to get him released—a procedure which would have been of no great difficulty if it had not seemed to the authorities a good chance to get a leading Methodist out of the country.

The English Church sought to be known as a supporter of the Government, an agency to keep the peace.

The denunciation of "enthusiasm," then, seemed to be a key to the favor of the ruling powers.

This, then, was the background of the eighteenth century's opposition to enthusiasm; the only enthusiasm of that century was the enthusiasm against enthusiasm.

The temper dated far back.

It is to be remembered that Wesley was born just a little after the close of the tensions of the seventeenth century, in a home in which regularity was the watchword and practice.

He took care to see that the excitement of the Methodist meetings did not arise from or reach to political causes.

So much was this true that careful students of religious movements have pronounced Methodism so distinctly religious as to make it a definite manifestation of spiritual power on its own account, without interest, except incidentally, in any social problems.

Some have seen in this one of those special seasons of divine favor to men for which all ought to be thankful; others have called it a hindrance and a slowing down of social

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progress.

In any event, this limitation of "enthusiasm" to religious aims has led to a tradition in some Methodist circles that intensively inner religion is the only concern worth becoming enthusiastic over.

We must next note that Wesley also denounced enthusiasm, giving it a definition with a twist of his own. He defined enthusiasm as a seeking the ends without using the means that would lead to the ends.

It is somewhat baffling to try to make much of this definition until we look at the religious beliefs and practices with which Wesley had to deal, most of which we have already at least glanced at.

Some of these are no longer living issues, as for example, quietism, which did not rely on what we call the "means of grace."" God would meet the soul in his own way. Therefore wait for him and do not trifle by reading the Scriptures, or paying attention to church ordinances. We can see at once just about how well all this would sit in the mind of a man who all his life had been trying to find means to apprehend the holiness of God, and means to spread that holiness over the earth.

We can at once see that in our time "enthusiasm," as Wesley defined it, would be in some varieties of mysticism—those that incline toward a direct union with God beyond the aid of all instrumentalities whatever.

Historically speaking, mysticism has depended quite as much upon means as any religious practice the Church has ever known.

The approach to the mystic vision has been up the hard, steep steps of prayer and fasting and extreme self-denial.

Yet the vision, once reached, has been so ineffable that it could not be communicated or described.

The objection Wesley had to the mystics as enthusiasts was that they did not make enough place for the distinctly Christian means—the study of the Scriptures and the classic utterances of the Church.

This, together with his opinion that the mystics talked much rank nonsense, made him so fierce against that highly regarded mystic, Jacob Behmen.

If we are likely to think that Wesley was alone in his attitude toward - Behmen, suppose we listen to Richard Baxter, writing a century earlier than Wesley.

"Their doctrine [that of the Behmenists] is to be seen in Jacob Behmen's books, by him that hath nothing else to do than to bestow a great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily understood, and to know that his bombasted words do signify nothing more than before was easily known by common familiar terms."

Wesley's definition of "enthusiasm" seems today to be unusual,

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but becomes more apt and pertinent the longer we look at it.

What is wilder, or crazier than the attempt to bring things to pass without appropriate means?

Benjamin Franklin used to refer to man as the tool-using animal. Human, material progress has come from man's ability to make and use tools. The similar truth holds in the realm of thought, as, let us say, in mathematics.

It has been said of old that God geometrizes and that, in the high reaches of mathematics, we think God's thoughts after him, though it is only within the last ten years that a scientist has informed us that God is a mathematician.

If, however, God is a mathematician, we cannot read his mathematics until we have mastered the mathematical tools with which we can bring him within our reach. If a seeker after mathematical truth should say that he was weary of equations and formulae and should insist upon gazing directly upon the truth, what could we say of him but that he was an "enthusiast" in Wesley's definition?

We should probably put our judgment in stronger phrases still.

In the social realm we have to advance by social instruments.

Take the threat of war, so omnipresent and so nearly omnipotent today. What is the trouble?

Can we say that wars come because the nations hate one another? Not altogether. Certainly, personal. hatred of the soldiers toward their enemies is not the chief cause.

Fear of one another in the hearts of the various nations counts for more than hate, or greed, for that matter.

Nationalistic impulses count, but a portentous lack counts also, the lack of any social machinery by which the disputes between nations can be adjusted, or prevented from arising.

It is an ironic comment on the so-called progress of civilization that, while the nations of the earth are racing furiously to get deadlier material instruments of war, they go at a laggard pace in the invention of the social instruments to prevent war.

For men seem to think that peace can come and stay just by the development of a peace sentiment.

Peace sentiment has to be more than sentimental.

It has to be more than a wish for peace.

It has to be the will for peace, the will which will deliberately seek agencies by which peace can be made.

According to Wesley's definition, "'enthusiasm" for peace would mean shouting for peace without the willingness to seek peace and pursue it. This is just about the next door to mental and moral aberration, to put it gently.

There are those in Christian churches today to whom Wesley's conception of "enthusiasm" is definitely applicable.

I refer to the

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good people who break out now and again in protest against all methods and means and agencies for the discovery and application of Christian truth, declaring that they are sick and tired of all these things; that, if we would only get directly to God, we could push all these devices to one side. I once attended a most important

Methodist meeting where the duty was that of the wisest and most equitable distribution of missionary funds. The plans were necessarily intricate.

One had to listen carefully in order to vote justly.

In the midst of the session one brother raised this protest that we ought to get close to God.

When asked how, he moved that we set aside the prepared program and devote the session to telling of our experiences in evangelism.

Which we did.

For three hours we told of evangelistic conquests that we had known here in America. That our problem was foreign missions did not seem to occur to any of the speakers. The events described were all of a bygone day. Nothing that was said bore directly on the tasks before us.

After we finished, we had but a short time left to do the work for which the Church had sent us to the meeting.

That work was jammed through hit-or-miss.

The "spirit" of the meeting was good; we "had a good time"'; and missions and missionaries paid for it all in the bungling results of a session that had become "'enthusiastic'" in the Wesleyan meaning.

Anyone who has read through the Larger Minutes, the minutes of the "conversations" in the early Methodist Conferences as revised by Wesley himself, will recall how careful Wesley was in urging smaller meetings where converts could be followed up for planned instruction as better than the large meetings where results could not be garnered.

The competence of Wesley is in nothing more manifest than in his finding means for his religious ends, and means too that came out of the life of his followers and lay close to hand.

It is often said that the highest inventive intellect is not that which can invent something outright of raw material, but that which can take the commonest material, or that which in largest quantity and closest access can be utilized for the desired purpose.

Wesley did just this.

It has been urged against him that he did not create anything outright.

This ought not to be discount but praise. He could not have left a Methodism with any lasting power whatever, if he had depended upon strange or totally new contrivances.

He was a popularizer of religion even in the means available to people.

Ay fist eis

PART VI

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

PART VI

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

LITTLE over thirty years after the Aldersgate uplift Wesley wrote: "Being alone in the coach I was considering several points of importance. And thus much appeared as clear as the day—that a man may be saved who cannot express himself properly concerning imputed righteousness.

'Therefore to do ) this is not necessary to salvation.

That a man may be saved who has not clear conceptions of it, yea, that never heard the phrase.

Therefore, clear conceptions of it are not necessary to salvation.

Yea, it is not necessary to salvation to use the phrase at all. That a pious churchman who has not clear conceptions even of justification by faith may be saved. Therefore clear conceptions even of this are not necessary to salvation.

That a mystic who denies justification by faith (Mr. Law, for instance) may be saved.

But, if so, what becomes of the articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae?

If so, is it not high time for us Projicere ampullas et sesquipedalia verba, and to return to the plain word, 'He that feareth God, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him'?"

Now, this was written when Wesley was sixty-six years old.

It is quite the custom to look for Wesley's wisdom in the utterances of his early years and to slur over the utterances of the later times as due perhaps to a lessening of vigor or to what Coleridge in a note on a margin of Southey's Life of Wesley called 'the poison of the easy chair."

Sixty-six was not for Wesley old age, however.

He was then at the height of his power and Methodism at the full tide of success.

The judgment just quoted was mature.

It is notably different from that of thirty years before, just as positive in its conclusion as the harshness of the early period, but, if anything, simpler and more direct, certainly more reasonable and scriptural.

He that feareth God and doeth righteousness is accepted of him.

Wesley still had his own standards as to what "fearing God" meant and what constituted doing righteousness, but he spoke in a vastly different temper from that of the opening years of his ministry.

The author of the article which deals with Wesley in the Cambridge History of the Eighteenth Century, quotes Lord Acton as saying that the crucial date in the relation of Wesley to the

JOHN WESLEY

Church of England was December 1, 1767, on which date Wesley entered in his Journal the conclusion quoted above that we must get rid of long words and simply fall back on the truth that he that feareth God and doeth righteousness is accepted of him.

Lord Acton says that this date rather than 1784 marks the separation of Methodism from the Church of England.

If the entry of Wesley has this significance, it has more, for, taken in its full implication, it means the secondary nature of any church organization whatsoever.

This leads us to what is possibly the most important of all Wesley's legacies to the world: his emphasis on the right of way of the primary spiritual demands over all organizational factors whatsoever. When Wesley penned the words to which Lord Acton referred, he was sixty-six years old. The idea there expressed had been germinating in his mind through many years, possibly without his realizing what was taking place in him or to him.

First, a word as to the channel through which the conception came to him, namely, his actual practical experience in seeking to save men.

The notion of salvation as dependent upon connection with a church, or the Church, once it takes hold of a life is almost impossible to shake off. Of course Wesley was not trying to minimize the Church, but to put it in its rightful place: that of an instrument of righteousness.

Here was a man who had for forty years been seeking to save men.

He had seen them saved; he had talked to them intimately about what salvation meant.

He had seen transformed lives. And in what had he seen these transformations result?

In lives fearing God and working righteousness.

It is understood all along that we are thinking of the Church on its organizational, doctrinal, ritualistic side.

'The Church is fundamentally the people who compose it. It was this that Wesley had before him when he spoke of salvation as social, and as coming to little apart from social relationships.

He believed in organizations as bringing people together, but the organizations must be taken as instruments and not as ends in themselves.

It has been said that the logic of the Protestant Reformation is complete individualism; which, indeed, it may be, but individualism is not opposed to companionship with one's fellows.

'The logic is not superior to the needs of life.

There has never been complete individualism.

There has never been an individual living absolutely alone. The historical and social fact is persons living together, living together at least in the beginning of the history of the race in such close

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

union that it was only late and slowly that the idea of distinctiveness of individuality arose.

All this Wesley knew and taught and acted upon.

He made the social salvation of the individuals. relationships significant for the The belief in a Church as an instrument, of course, has to meet the objection that we come out at the same place as when we think of the organization as an end in itself, for, if the Church is indispensable as an instrument, the indispensability is all-important.

To which the reply is that, if an instrument is indispensable, it is a means to an end, and is subordinate to the purposes for which it is intended. An instrument is sacred for what it can do. An instrument which can do better work than another instrument is more sacred than that other. An instrument can be modified, or changed completely, or put aside, if some other and better tool can be discovered or invented. j To apply this conception to rites of the Church—baptism and the matter in hand: Take the the Lord's Supper.

At the beginning of his ministry Wesley held views which made these rites more than instruments.

They had a sacredness on their own account.

Something happened to a man in baptism due to the rite itself. Wesley said that the power of cleansing in his early baptism had not been wholly lost at Charterhouse. It was not merely an in- 'strument;-or symbol of dedication of the life to righteousness, or a sign of the spiritual cleansing of cleansing efficacy was in the rite, * ~~ \y | :% the heart by the Divine.

'The with inevitable emphasis upon the significance and power of a redemptive force in the rite as a rite.

Now, move over to the other position and think of the rite as ceremony marking the determination of a human will to do the will of God, and of the redemptive cleansing by spiritual—not material—power. ~If a particular baptism is necessary for salvation, that means either that a peculiar virtue is lodged in the water itself,

'or that.

God so cares for one material method that he will not yedeem through any other. One notion is just as worthy as the a" other. How man could believe this or anything like it is not our task to consider.

Suffice it to say that for a time Wesley believed this, though he would never have put the belief in such stark terms as these.

So with the spiritual results of partaking of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

In college Wesley used to "communicate," as it was called, two or three times a week.

It is not easy to suppose that he would have done this if he had not believed there was saving

JOHN WESLEY

efficacy in the sacrament itself.

No belief in the history of the Church is more persistent than that of supernatural power in this sacrament.

The present writer once served on a committee to see if by various Protestant denominations, including one important group in Europe, any theory as to the sacraments could be worked out which would draw these denominations into closer unity. One of the committee, a distinguished theological professor from Europe, kept laying stress on the supernatural efficacy of the Lord's

Supper. I finally asked if the will of the participant, his determination to lead a new life, had any importance in the spiritual benefit to the communicants.

The reply was "No," that we had to keep the emphasis on the divine element.

I then asked if a participant who partook of the sacrament unwittingly, or even unwillingly, would be benefited.

The reply was "Yes," which came very near to saying that a man could be made good in spite of himself or whether he wished to be made good or not. Now, the entry to which Acton referred may not have meant that on December 1, 1767, Wesley was thinking specifically of the Lord's Supper, but the implication was unmistakable enough.

If he who fears God and worketh righteousness is acceptable to God, and if that is the main requisite, then the sacrament is instrumental, unless we are ready to say that partaking of the sacrament is indispensable in fearing God and doing righteousness.

Wesley just had to see, working as he was, that no sacrament could be the fundamental in the salvation of men.

Chiefly for the sake of not breaking with the Church of England, Wesley would not allow his lay preachers to conduct the sacrament.

Inasmuch, however, as he beheld men converted from sin to righteousness by the preaching of his laymen, and their lives marked by the fear of God, he could not, as a sensible being, put that preaching in a place inferior to the sacraments.

Then as to regularity of the ministry: Wesley was brought up in the belief of the sacredness of ordination. There is no use trying to blink the fact that he took ordination with high seriousness.

It was in the earlier years important to him that he had been ordained by one who stood in a line making possible not, indeed, a belief in apostolic succession, but in ecclesiastical continuity. Himself a regular by nature, Wesley easily and naturally fitted into the belief in an especial sacredness in the regular ministry. Two things, however, must have sunk deeper and deeper into his mind as he traveled up and down England—indeed, he repeatedly talked of

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

them. First was that in the actual persuasion of men to quit sin and turn to righteousness his lay preachers were more effective than many, if not most, of those of the Established Church.

Wesley did not cherish any illusions about his lay preachers. He did not think of them as of any other training than that of practically leading men into new life.

If one were as good a Hebrew scholar as any he had ever known, he said so in terms of highest appreciation; but he did not look to his lay helpers for technical scholarship.

He himself guided their study, always with the increase of religious effectiveness in mind.

He gave all credit to the ministers of the Church of England for the good they could do, but he did not think of these ministers as to be put into the same class with his preachers for evangelistic effectiveness.

Now, let a man like Wesley have, day after day, chance to think this over, away from all church influences, about the sacredness of the ministry as based on correctness of ordination, or other formal organizational requirement as such, and he can come to only one conclusion, namely, that such requirement is secondary. We wonder that it would take a man of ordinary eyesight, to say nothing of insight, any considerable period of attention to see this, though many, very many, do not see it to this day.

The second consideration was the worldly conduct of many of the clergy of the Established Church. 'This argument has probably been overworked.

'There were many clergymen in the Church of England who were thoroughly devoted to their tasks.

They lived in a barren time, religiously, and could not find any way out of the spiritual desert.

Still, there were secularly-minded clergymen, some of whom were loose in their lives. Now, when Wesley heard as often as he did that it was not the character of the minister that counted but official connection, as something sacred in itself, it was more than he could stand.

He was himself working night and day, all the days in the year, to bring men to the kingdom of God. When he saw others utterly idle, it could not but undermine his confidence in the efficacy of a sacredness which was professedly official.

Moreover, Wesley had the witness of his own consciousness as to something of the secret of his own power.

In some respects Wesley had the strength which comes from profound self-knowledge. He knew how he had obtained the new life. He knew how little mere official connection with a church had to do with that life.

Just what relation there was between his ordination and the experiences to which he attained again and again would become

JOHN WESLEY

more and more of a mystery to him whom the Church was opposing just because he taught the experiences.

Not only could Wesley not help seeing the absurdity of the claim that ordination by a bishop gave a minister a sacredness, when the bishop was not himself sacred in character, but he became most realistic in his attitude toward bishops themselves.

He had become convinced, he said, by his studies of the primitive Church, that a presbyter was a bishop, and that, therefore, he was himself on the same level as a bishop. This has often been taken as a theme for prolonged argument.

It has been assumed by some church historians that they have disposed of Wesley's attitude toward bishops when they have pointed out the limping weaknesses of his historical argument.

This is not taking Wesley by quite the right hold.

Wesley was not overanxious to put himself on the same level as bishops. What he was doing was to show that he did not take them with especial seriousness.

'The actual encounters he had had with them were not of the happiest.

Joseph Butler he admired profoundly, as we have already seen; but it was from Butler that he received the order to get out of the Bristol diocese, where a host of Methodist converts had been won.

With other bishops he had sharp passages.

Once, when asked whether he did not intend to obey the bishops, he replied that he would do so if they were worthy. This was to put his own judgment above that of the Church which had created the bishops.

It was the essence of rebellion against regular ecclesiastical authority.

This meant, at least in implication, that while Wesley never let go his loyalty to the Church, he had come to rank it as an organization altogether in a minor place, its sacredness to be determined by its efficiency in producing spiritual results. What happened to those whom the Church touched?

All this now seems commonplace, though there is here and there something of a revival of the older notion.

It was innovation at the time it was first uttered.

'Tell anyone today that both Wesley and Whitefield deemed it necessary to preach that a preacher himself ought to be a man of religious life, of new birth, conversion— whatever term one pleases—or that the life of the preacher ought itself to set forth the truth proclaimed; and one is likely to be met with a stare of bewilderment at such utterance of the obvious. Yet the Church organization and its ordinances, as sacred in themselves, had such hold on the eighteenth-century religious thinking that

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

the importance of Church regularity overshadowed the necessity of right living in the ministry.

— Or think of the regard with which in America the sacraments were held after Methodism began to spread. There was no bishop in America—bishop of the English Church, I mean—who could ordain ministers here.

After Methodism began to win converts, there were not enough priests of the English Church to administer the sacraments.

The heaviest pressure for the ordination of ministers in America came from this demand for the sacraments; the stiffest opposition from the feeling of the sacredness of the ordinances of the Church.

It was almost impossible for a time to make headway with the idea that sacraments were instrumental.

If a miracle was wrought in a sacrament, of course the utmost scrupulousness would have to mark the observance of the conditions which would lead to the miracle.

If a sacrament is an instrument, it can be dealt with more freely.

Ina word, Wesley believed in means of grace.

The ordinances of the Church were means, but means of grace. The grace made sacred the means, and the means helped to the attainment of the grace.

If one fancies all this is to be taken as a matter of course, one will never gain any appreciation of Wesley as an innovator. Wesley was not an innovator by choice or by inclination.

He never made any departure from the ordinary path except as he was virtually compelled to do so. The labor of seeking to save the souls of men forced him to the emphasis that the all-essential was to get men to fearing God and to doing righteousness.

At this point the rift between him and the English Church was indicated by the entry on December 1, 1767, but the seed sown there did not bear fruit till far later.

Unless one does have the cue given by this entry, one will have to pronounce Wesley insubordinate and rebellious.

On the assumptions of the "regular" clergy of the time the case against Wesley is fairly complete.

The ordinances of the Church were sacred to Wesley, in the instrumental sense.

He was devoted to the Church, and never ceased saying so.

How to reconcile his devotion with his attitude toward the bishops the orthodox churchmen could not tell.

There is always difficulty about understanding a middle way.

To the regular churchman of the eighteenth century the Church as an institution had to be all or nothing.

Either it was a sacred object of divine power, or just nothing at all. When, therefore,

Wesley insisted upon saying for himself when the Church was to

JOHN WESLEY

be obeyed, he seemed virtually to be putting himself outside the Church.

It sometimes happens that an observer on the outside can see a meaning in what a historic leader does which the leader may not himself suspect.

Lord Acton called to our attention that Déllinger, the Catholic historian, considered Richard Baxter and John Wesley the most significant Protestant figures since the Reformation.

Acton affirmed that Déllinger was thinking of Wesley as he was after December, 1767:

Lord Acton, as well as Déllinger, was a Catholic. The reason why Acton spoke thus was that he saw at the above date a complete break by Wesley from the English Church. The discernment of these two as to what Wesley was really doing may be sound enough, but if they had any notion that Wesley would under any circumstances have felt differently toward the Roman Church, they would have done well to point out something other than Wesley's emphasis on a religious experience that was altogether above the reach of religious organizations as he knew them.

Lord Acton too did not take sufficient account of the Wesleyan psychology, which allowed room for at least as much contradiction in his life as in the experience of other human beings.

Men accept principles without realizing their implications.

Sometimes the implications play havoc in a mind's life through the stress they set up, but oftener they lie dormant until they break forth with unforeseen explosion in a crisis.

Oftener still they do not come into clear light until the followers bring them forth.

Wesley's theory of the Church did indeed change, but he did not relax in his insistence that his followers remain in the Church of England.

All this may seem like carrying out a commonplace observance to intolerable length, but will the reader please have patience a moment longer?

Here is involved the essence of every form of High-Churchism.

If a Church has organizational values which are necessary to men's salvation, then, though there may be possible exceptions like those provided for by the Roman Church in the doctrine of invincible ignorance, there is no salvation outside the reach of the sacred ordinances.

Here we are on the path to the terrible battles between religious groups, which so often end in persecution of one type and another.

No matter how absolute some of the claims of a Church may be, this emphasis on virtual High-Churchism often does have an instrumental basis, in spite of the declarations of the Church to

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

the contrary.

Take the doctrine of papal infallibility: the claim that when the Pope is speaking ex cathedra his is the veritable voice of God.

As such there is but one course for the faithful.

They have only to obey. They do not have room for debate or question.

Now, approach a Roman Catholic about papal infallibility and you often find him quite willing to talk.

This willingness itself is significant; for, if the Pope actually speaks for God, there does not seem to be much reason for talk by men.

The Roman Catholic, however, makes the same appeal to results as does the pragmatic holder of the position that any church belief has to be justified by the practical consequences. From the outside, from the assumption of the non-Catholic, the papal infallibility is instrumental.

It is a device of expediency, a court of last resort like the United States Supreme Court.

In all institutional doings someone has to say the last word.

The insistence that the Pope speaks as God's voice necessarily makes his word the last. Those of us who are not Catholics are sure that the Pope is not infallible.

If the Roman Church could see how much difficulty it would escape by taking the instrumental position, and would act upon that understanding, it would be better off in every way. Churches are always prone to claim more than is necessary.

A good Catholic would go wild to hear the Pope compared to an umpire, but he ought to see that umpires are among the most useful agents in modern life. Their decisive word closes cases and helps the game go on.

Even if Wesley's word on December 1, 1767, were only a seed dropped, it will not do to take it lightly. Wesley's after development was an unfolding of the principle there stated.

Moreover, the statement itself went far. Wesley said that it was clear to him that a man might be saved even if he did not know anything about imputed righteousness.

Inasmuch as that was one of the doctrines taught by the Church, Wesley's remark was equivalent to saying that, at least on one important doctrine, it was not necessary to salvation to be taught by the Church.

This was, under all the circumstances, the opening of a wide gate.

As to the instrumental nature of church doctrines, we have no right to claim Wesley for modern pragmatism, though his words look in that direction.

Any doctrine formulated, let us say, in the twentieth century, if it has any appreciable degree of truth at all, has been anticipated in utterances of acute thinkers and observers decades and even centuries before.

Any doctrine is at bottom an attempt to bring out into clear system what has already

JOHN WESLEY

been implicit in ordinary human experience.

Pragmatism of the extreme type holds that truth and usefulness are one and the same, that the only measure of the truth of an idea is the extent to which it can be used. Wesley can be claimed only for pragmatism as a method. He would judge doctrines by what came out of them.

The method would help to the seizure of the truth, and be an indication of the soundness of the truth, but that would be all. The awareness of Divine Presence—God is with us—was to Wesley the spiritual state above all others to be sought. We may be confident that Wesley would regard a formal theology of a Church as a means to help on to self-evidencing life.

'The theology itself he would not at most have regarded as more than a tool, and that an imperfect tool.

I have repeatedly said that we must always try to keep ourselves at Wesley's center of view. If we do this, shifting of emphasis from the Church ordinances to the instrumental relationship will appear to be one of Wesley's most valuable bequests to the world.

After all, it is not so self-evident today that the instrumental idea has won a complete triumph. At the death of Wesley in 1791 a strain was set up in the Methodist groups over the question of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, which promised to wreck the movement itself. We now and again read that, as soon as the hand of Wesley fell from the helm of Methodism, the ship steered itself straight away from the Church of England. Methodism did indeed soon begin its existence as a separate Church, but not quite as inevitably and as speedily as we sometimes fancy. Moreover, it was not merely the influence of Methodism which was holding the society back, but this feeling about the sacraments.

Many who had the most complete devotion to Wesleyan principles stopped stockstill when they were asked to receive the Lord's Supper at the hands of the preachers of Methodism who had not been ordained at the hands of bishops of the English Church.

These secondary features of a Church have a power that has to be felt to be understood. Abraham

Lincoln was reported to have said that, when he found a Church that would set up as its sole requirement that men should love God with all their hearts, soul, mind, strength, and their neighbors as themselves, he would be glad to join it. There has never been any such Church of large numerical proportions, and it is not likely that there soon will be.

In every denomination the secondary features get up, sooner or later, into the primary importance.

The theme is admittedly difficult.

Wesley insisted that salva-

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

tion was social, and that it had to be so from the nature of man himself.

Inasmuch as the Church is a group of men who are ends in themselves, sacred on their own account, the Church as this group isa veritable body of Christ. There are, however, impersonal features about a Church which serve the personal.

Practically, these impersonal factors are for the most of us indispensable. Yet even here the Wesley principle opened the door to those outside the Church.

Moreover, do we ourselves not seldom speak of an invisible body of Christ—the body of true believers whose religious life may or may not be drawn from church connections?

This doctrine of the invisible body implies that there may be in the Church those who have not the Spirit of Christ.

Likewise there may be those outside the Church who have the Spirit of Christ.

Wesley was most careful here.

He was convinced that the heathen who never had heard of Christ were to be tested by their living up to what light they had in their own consciénces.

Here, again, is an open door.

For heathenism cannot be called an affair of geography.

What about the heathen who live in Christian lands?

Have these all heard Christ preached?

It is easy to say that all who live within sound of a church bell have had opportunity to hear Christ preached.

Would John Wesley have admitted this? We can be quite sure that he would not.

Was the service in the Church of England in Wesley's day the preaching of Christ?

Not always.

If much that I have been saying in the last few paragraphs seems to deal with far-off forgotten things and battles long ago, let us remember that we cannot understand Wesley unless we understand the battles which were real in his day. The same battles are more real in our day than we always care to concede.

The whole problem is complicated to us of today, aud it was even more complicated in Wesley's day.

All sorts of practical expediences crowd in to obscure the essentials. I once heard Bishop

Gore addressing a group of some hundreds of churchmen who were trying to define the Church in such fashion as to win the approval

~ of representatives of a score of different denominations.

Bishop Gore reminded his hearers that none of the proposed definitions had included one most vital consideration, namely, that there were large numbers of persons, some of whom he knew intimately— skeptics, agnostics, or atheists—whose spirit was that of Christ and who must be brought, at least in our regard, into the membership of the invisible Church.

Whereupon a sturdy denominationalist arose and declared that he did not doubt the truth of what the

JOHN WESLEY

Bishop had said, but that he was sorry such words had been spoken, inasmuch as they tended to weaken the authority of the Church.

It seemed that the authority of the Church would be weakened if the full glory of the Church should be revealed.

It will be noted that this objecting brother virtually admitted that he was moved by a practical consideration.

It is none of our task to discuss the Roman Catholic theory of the Church beyond saying that the notion of the sacredness in itself of the Church of England was an inheritance from Rome, from which, except politically, the English Church did not break.

Not two centuries before Wesley was born the Church of England broke from the Pope to take Henry VIII as its head. The dissenters were the determined foes of Rome. 'Though Wesley's ancestors on both sides had been dissenters, he was solidly opposed to dissent.

His mother had been born into a dissenting family and had turned again to the Church, and his father had deliberately rejected dissent.

Wesley called himself a High Churchman from the beginning. All the more remarkable, then, his acceptance of the idea of the Church as instrumental.

We have come to a day when church union is a current theme.

We may just as well note, then, that the Wesleyan doctrine of church organization as instrumental may deepen the movement toward union, or it may do just the reverse.

The emphasis on the Church as the means of the development of religious life may make the choice of means so indifferent that it will not seem worth while to those most earnest in the search for higher life to trouble themselves overmuch about organization.

That the seekers for the best are brought into a larger fellowship may seem so important as to warrant any surrender of organizational forms.

On the other hand, the denominational forms may seem to others to be important as making a rallying point for the smaller groups, the minorities in whose association the seekers after life may find a more intense, although narrower type of experience.

The attitude of Wesley toward the Church, as might have been expected when he made the uniting bond of the Church only a common interest in spiritual concerns, sent his followers in different directions.

There were those who remained in the English Church, and probably after the death of Wesley had less and less to do with the Methodist societies.

'This was all more possible because, after the persecution of the Methodists ceased, let us say about 1760, the Evangelical Movement in the Church of Eng-

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

land began to take on power, and had become a force to be reckoned with by the end of the century.

To Wesley himself we may give a generous share of the credit for the evangelical impulse in the Church, though there were other men making their contributions besides Wesley, and other influences besides Wesleyan. 'The Church, awakened by the evangelical spirit, began to think of Wesley as a leader and saint, and has continued to think of him thus to this day.

A second direction taken by other followers of Wesley was that of membership in the Methodist Church as an ecclesiastical body, independent and ecclesiastically self-sufficient.

'This was not what Wesley intended.

Some students think that Wesley's course with his societies made separation inevitable.

Perhaps.

Nevertheless, a number not at all negligible refused to follow the societies out of the Church.

The separation, if it had been inevitable and foreseen, would have led Wesley to a different course in training his followers. He did not think of Methodism as a Church.

If he had foreseen that it was not possible to prevent its being a Church, he in all likelihood would have sought to make it, in many respects, a different instrument than it was when he left it. The Legal Hundred was the nucleus of what afterward became a Church.

By the way, Wesley's choosing a hundred to be the legal body raises interesting questions which we do not have time to consider.

The number was, of course, arbitrary, and left out some good men.

This brought a quite unnecessary tinge of bitterness into the beginnings of the formal body. Wesley avowedly had no sympathy with republicanism, which to him meant actual rule by the people.

One hundred made up a considerable number, though not the "people" by any means.

Wesley took his lay preachers as the heart of the Methodist system, but he had no place for laymen as such in the government of Methodism. He met the problem of lay control when the laymen sought to be trustees of the preaching places which _ they had paid for, since he did not care to have lay trustees passing on the virtual choice of ministers, by himself deciding who should or should not preach in this or that preaching place.

'There are signs, however, that the favor of laymen counted in the choice of preachers even in the old days.

The Legal Hundred group went ahead finally to the organization of a new denomination, following what might be called the conservatism of Wesley, conservatism in ministerial control and in

JOHN WESLEY

attitudes toward social questions.

Other Methodist groups broke away and proceeded along more democratic roads.

It required over a hundred years of church experience and of the general world-progress of social understanding and practice to get Methodism together again into a unified body.

In this emphasis on the instrumental aspect of a Church, Wesley opened the door to splits and secessions.

If the stress is thus put on religious results of the inner type, naturally an individual, feeling that he may choose the instrument which will best suit his religious purpose, will move about among church organizations more or less at his own will.

He will not pay much heed to many features of a long-established Church which tend to hold the members in one body—the venerable impressiveness of the town cathedral, the continuity of the liturgy through centuries of use, all the emotions which are aroused by the teaching that the creed has been believed always in the Church, by everybody, everywhere.

This latter consideration weighed heavily with Wesley himself in his earlier years.

Now, this emphasis on the Church as an instrument for the development of the inner personal life can be balanced by the realization of the value of the Church as an instrument for what might be called collective or corporate prophecy on social questions.

This realization, however, was a long time in coming to Methodism.

It is indeed a recent arrival, and has arrived only when the united sentiment of the Church has been aroused over questions which are chiefly personal, like Hugh Price Hughes's attack on the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell because of the irregularities of Parnell's personal conduct.

Wesley's difficulty in holding the Methodist group together was owing somewhat to the fact that the new population of which I have already so often spoken had never known any church but Methodism. This is a point which we must insist on even with wearisome repetition. 'The gains of Methodism were not made in chief degree among those united with the Church of England.

One reads the diary of Parson Woodforde, for example, who served a country parish for nearly half a century, and wonders why there is hardly any reference to Methodism.

Woodforde was a close enough observer to have seen what was going on.

If the Methodists had been making any deep impression in his neighborhood, he would have written at least a few entries about them. In the five large volumes, however, there is almost nothing of the sort.

This was because

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

Woodforde did not live in an industrial center, but among people whose needs the Church appeared to satisfy. The dwellers in the new industrial centers knew Methodism, and could not make much of Wesley's insistence that they ally themselves with the Church of England.

I have aready spoken of the Hammonds—J. L. and Barbara.

No one has understood better the labor situations and developments in the England following the Industrial Revolution than the Hammonds.

These tell us that the important social movement in England of the latter part of the eighteenth century was toward tradeunionism, which concerned the same class as that which Wesley touched; that Wesleyanism split the interests of the labor class and diverted to other-worldly interests energies which should have gone to the organization of the unions.

The Hammonds argue their case with cogency, but at times they become absurd, almost to the verge of silliness.

For example, they speak of the money raised for the Wesleyan chapels as if it ought to have gone to trade-union movements; indeed, the implication is that the contributions of laborers to Wesleyanism were a diversion of funds from their true, natural purpose, and that to this extent the churchmanship of Wesley, or his devotion to his societies, was a mistake.

All of which is quite a tribute to Wesley's making his societies successful. We cannot make much of the career of Wesley up to the years near the close unless we think of him as loyal to the Established Church and as aiming to make Methodism a society in that Church.

It may be that we get astray through not taking adequate account of the part played by societies in the churches which have had a history of centuries.

We in America are not likely to have much basis for the judgment of the worth of a society in a church.

We are likely to think of it as a Ladies' Aid group, or a Men's Club, or a Christian Endeavor organization.

In fact, we have to look to the important orders of the Roman Catholic Church, or to the many societies in the career of the English Church, to understand what

Methodism on the organizational side meant to Wesley.

In any considerable Church which aspires to be at all catholic, there must be room for groups of like-minded members who give themselves specifically to the development of particular phases of the truth or forms of practice.

Such groups must, of course, be loyal to the main organization, but they can often best show that loyalty by developing and maintaining what might appropriately be called their own specialties. It is about as clear as anything of

JOHN WESLEY

the sort can be that it is only by the existence of such smaller units in a larger body that the main body can accomplish anything especially worth while.

Principal A. D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol, in his Essentials of Democracy, has shown that in nationwide democracies like England and the United States the large bodies are safe only as they contain within themselves smaller organs of likeminded persons, such as trade-unions and professional organizations which have massiveness enough to hold guiding ideas before the democracy.

If this is true in a democracy, it is perhaps more true of a Church that reaches throughout a nation or through many nations.

This does not quite mean federation, for federation has about it, in view of the federal principle of the United States Government, a suggestion of states territorially separate.

A society in a Church is not likely to be organized territorially, but may be composed of members throughout the whole connection.

Nor does this mean the recognition of minority groups as ordinarily understood, for, when we speak of a minority, we usually carry a hint of a party in opposition, and a society in a Church may not be in opposition.

Wesley's aim was to spread scriptural holiness, speaking in the name of the Church to those whom the Church could not reach, or was not reaching.

It may be that at the beginning Wesley did not even think of any special form of society, but he could not have gone far without asking himself whither his movement was tending.

There cannot be any doubt that he did not countenance the notion of his group's becoming a body of dissenters or nonconformists. 'There cannot be any doubt either that he thought of himself as a HighChurchman, for that is what he called himself.

Understand, we are trying to find the ideas in Wesley's mind during the active days of his leadership, for those ideas must have colored all his work.

Unless we are prepared to concede that Wesley was not sincere in what he urged upon his followers, we must hold fast to his meaning what he said, which was that he would not countenance any secession of Methodists from the Church of England.

This means that Wesley's greatness as a leader had as one of its qualities a willingness to work with a limited aim. We have quoted in Part IV his remark that, when he started out upon his wider campaigning, he did not expect the Methodist Movement to last more than thirty years, and that one of its most astonishing achievements was that, at the time of the remark, it had gone fifty. Now,

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

when a man lays plans for thirty years, he is surely working with a different set of ideas from those he keeps before him when he is planning for an indefinite future.

Wesley certainly expected the English Church to last more than fifty years.

Moreover, he sought to prevent the Methodists from holding services at such hours as to conflict with the services of the Established Church. This can be interpreted as an attempt to prevent any friction between the Methodist meetings and the regular exercises of the Church, but such interpretation would not be enough of an explanation of a rule to be followed for half a century.

The more satisfactory explanation is that Wesley desired his followers to get something from the services of the Church.

This meant that there were, in Wesley's judgment, some religious values to be found by Methodists in the Church which they could not find in their own meetings.

It will be urged against all this that Wesley did give himself to courses that made the establishment of Methodism as a Church virtually inevitable.

We are not, however, just now so much concerned with the outcome of Wesley's attitude toward ecclesiastical problems as with his intentions, and with the limitations he set upon himself. These limitations reveal Wesley's understanding of the human material with which he worked, and of the conditions under which any revivalistic movement must be carried on.

We must remember that Wesley conceived of his task as revival.

His father had told him that he would one day see the work of the Lord revived in England, and he had lived in that expectation. With all

Wesley's disparagement of the Church, he does not ever seem to have questioned either its perpetuity or its place in the divine plan for the redemption of the world.

Now, a Church which exists solely for revival can hardly be called a Church: it is an agency for performing one of the functions of a Church.

Revival work, in the nature of things, is preliminary.

Of course the analogies are not happy, but the revival efforts of a Church and the recruiting efforts

of an army and the promotional activities of a business are alike in that the main task is to be attacked after the recruiting and pro- — moting are accomplished.

Promotion of any variety demands an order of ability peculiarly itself, a high and rare ability indeed when the promotion takes the form of evangelization for Christianity.

Yet such ability is not the final Christian grace. We refer again to the remark of William James that certain types of mind are triggerpullers for human consciousness—those that have the power of so suggestively stating truth, or so compellingly phrasing it, that their

JOHN WESLEY

utterances are of a crisis-making order that discharges, so to speak, the stored-up mass of the content of their hearers' minds into resolution or insight which might never have been possible if it had not been for the trigger-puller.

'The difficulty here is that the evangelistic trigger-puller so often thinks that he can store the mind with the "load," let us say, that is to be released.

That load may be the teaching and reflection and dreams of many previous years, released into life-changing power by the trigger-puller, but the trigger-puller may be himself the last man fitted to do the loading of the mind. Wesley knew all this perfectly.

He did not, at least until age had made inroads on his mental vitality, have the slightest illusion as to the nature and characteristics of the Methodism he had founded and led.

What men mean when they say that Wesley made the separation from the Church inevitable is his consenting to ordain ministers for the administration of the sacraments.

This happened, it will be remembered, in the closing years of his life, when the springs of his strength had begun torun low. The oft-quoted word charged against Wesley's conduct is "Ordination is separation."

Of course it is, if the leaders of a Church are bound to have it so.

In an age when some special ordaining sanctity is supposed to be lodged in the hands of the ordaining officiary, it is possible to utter wise saws like this.

Then, of course, it is possible further to talk of apostolic succession and other such nonsense, in which Wesley himself did not believe, and in which some of the strictest adherents of the English Church themselves do not today believe.

The nub of the talk of Wesley's countenancing separation is the ordination of some men to be virtually bishops—Thomas Coke in particular, inasmuch as Coke was the first of the few to be so ordained.

Coke was thinking of the American situation, and more than a little of Coke.

'The American situation was in a word this: that from 1766, or from 1770 on, the Methodists in America had grown in numbers to several thousand.

They had to do without the benefit of the sacraments unless a minister of the English

Church happened to be near at hand.

There is no other instance in ecclesiastical history to compare with the loyalty of the American

Methodists of those early days to the Established Church, a loyalty which is about equally pathetic and ridiculous.

Methodists were converted, brought into a society, and led devout lives for ten or a dozen years without even having been baptized or having partaken of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. The strange feature is that

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

the Methodists did not draw the conclusion early in this stage of affairs, especially after the English Church had refused to send a bishop or to ordain Methodist preachers in America, that the sacraments were of no value anyhow. The Methodists in America were three thousand miles away from England, a six or eight weeks' sail across the dangerous Atlantic—as far in time as today the borders of Tibet are from New York. Few historians today will say that the Declaration of Independence of America from England was a mistake, historically speaking.

The separation was inevitable.

The separation of the American Methodists from all English ecclesiastical connections was likewise inevitable, and likewise the severing of all official connections between American and English Methodism.

As to America's becoming independent, Wesley could not help that. The situation in America was totally different from that in England.

The Methodists in America, persistently loyal to Wesley, waited for some advice from him, but finally they acted on their own.

Asbury would not accept the ordination, or the setting apart, for supervision of Methodism, till he had been elected superintendent by the Methodist preachers in Conference.

The Conference took matters in its own hands and made itself the organ of a separate Church. Whether Wesley had a right to lay hands on Coke's head, or Coke to lay hands on Asbury, has no significance.

A gleam of light as to Wesley's feeling on the whole matter, however, can be found from that famous letter of his to Asbury—the "Dear Franky" letter.

It is refreshing to read that Wesley was so upset by Asbury's calling himself a bishop.

Asbury did do just that, but American Methodism acquiesced.

Wesley is content to be called plain Mr. Wesley, as dictators usually have been. There is considerable point in the old remark that, if a leader of a mass of men wishes dictatorial powers, he would better not allow himself to be called by any title that itself suggests such powers.

He would do well to accept no title but plain "Mr." For titles like "king" in the political sphere and "bishop" in the ecclesiastical put the doubtful on their guard at once. At any rate, Wesley's control over the Methodists had been all but papal.

It is delightful, therefore, to hear him reproach Asbury for assuming the title of bishop.

London, September 20, 1788.

There is indeed a wide difference between the relation wherein you stand to the Americans and the relation wherein I stand to all the

JOHN WESLEY

Methodists.

You are the elder brother of the American Methodists: I am under God the father of the whole family.

But in one point, my dear brother, I am a little afraid both the Doctor [Coke] and you differ from me. I study to be little: you study to be great.

I creep: you strut along...

One instance of this, of your greatness, has given me great concern.

How can you, how dare you suffer yourself to be called Bishop?

I shudder, I start at the very thought! Men may call mea knave or a fool, a rascal, a scoundrel, and I am content; but they shall never by my consent call me Bishop!

Thus, my dear Franky, I have told you all that is in my heart.

Your affectionate friend and brother, JouN WESLEY.

Asbury referred to this letter, the last he received from Wesley, as a "bitter pill." One cannot help wondering how Wesley would have felt if Asbury, in replying, had addressed him as "My dear

Johnny."

All this from the chiefly personal side, but this is not all.

The "Franky" note reveals something of Wesley's feeling on the main issue.

The truth appears to be that in the last half dozen years of his life, or in the period when he had passed eighty, Wesley had lost something of the old sureness of his grasp. He was against separation from the Church of England, but he had to deal with men who were pushing him in that direction, among them Thomas

Coke. Coke's ability and devotion were beyond question. He was a man of thorough educational training, made possible through what was in those days reckoned large wealth.

He had as high a degree as Oxford could give. Coke had more than any other early

Methodist a true missionary spirit.

First and last he made nine journeys to America, and boasted that he could travel on horseback ten thousand miles a year in America, though he never did it.

Asbury averaged five thousand miles a year, and Wesley from fortyfive hundred to five thousand.

Coke was distressingly full of the desire to be a bishop and finally prevailed on Wesley to lay hands on him in ordination to a position which Wesley thought of in terms chiefly of superintendency and which Coke soon called bishopric.

When Coke tried to exercise episcopal functions in England, the preachers protested. When he planned to go to India as a missionary, he wrote to an influential lord of the English realm to see if he could not be made a bishop of the English Church—and failed.

Nobody knows just what passed between Wesley and Coke, but

TOWARD METHODISM'S INDEPENDENCE

Coke got from Wesley something that he felt warranted him taking the title bishop, though he finally agreed to use the title only in America.

Now, it was evidently with much of this in mind that Wesley wrote to Asbury.

He had misgivings as to what he had done, and perhaps unconsciously revealed those misgivings when he reproached Asbury for using the Episcopal title.

It isa tangled story. Some things, however, are clear. Wesley did not want separation from the English Church, yet he could not but be aware of the tendencies toward separation.

The Church was not willing to make any concessions which would help the Methodists as to baptism and the Lord's Supper.

That was an ugly fact, of which more in a moment.

Over all was the idea of some sort of sanctity in the ordination of the so-called "regular" way, a notion of which Wesley was not himself free. Charles Wesley was scandalized when he heard of Wesley's laying hands on Coke, for, if there was any especially sacred virtue in Wesley's thus ordaining Coke, there would have been just as much virtue in Coke's laying hands on Wesley, technically speaking. John wrote back to Charles stating that, if Charles had been at hand to lend advice, he, John, might have done differently.

This surely was going far for John Wesley.

Underneath all this wretched suggestiveness which clings to the laying-on of hands, the suggestion of a mystic and magic impartation of at least ecclesiastical power, there are two firm strands of fact. After all allowance has been made for John Wesley's almost superstitious regard for some features of ecclesiastical procedure, he was possessed of a sound instinct in standing for Methodism as a body within the English Church.

He knew the shortcomings of the Church; but he knew also that, in spite of those shortcomings, the Church had continuity of history, a reach over all England, a body of doctrines substantially agreed upon, a priesthood which could at least be trained into effectiveness.

He knew that there was a living body there, no matter how weak and debilitated it might for the moment be.

He knew also that separation is the path to anarchy. 'There was a regularity about John Wesley which was more than conventionality.

He knew the worth of ecclesiastical results achieved through centuries; he knew that, if these were lightly left behind in separation, it would take centuries for the new body to develop them anew.

With all due respect to Methodism since Wesley's day, we have to concede the soundness of this

JOHN WESLEY

instinct.

Methodism's methods of worship for the last century and a half have certainly not been barren, but it has just as certainly been what can too often justly be called bare.

Now for the other side. The pressure on Wesley for consent to separation became almost irresistible.

Methodism, conscious of a conquering force, did not think of its own limitations—indeed, did not know them.

On the other hand, the larger part of the blame for the separation must go to the Church of England.

One of the profoundest tributes ever paid that Church was Wesley's stand against the Methodists' leaving it. We have heard the charge against Wesley that he was at best a rebellious son of the Church, that he virtually defied it all his life.

One of the most devoted of Methodists writing in the Contemporary Review, July, 1887, marvels at the leniency of the Anglican bishops in not bringing Wesley to book, and seems to think that this was due to the tolerant spirit of the English episcopacy.

Tolerant spirit indeed, but it seems more like lethargy, sleepiness.

The Church had lost from its leadership almost all trace of venturesomeness except that which was revealing itself in Wesley.

It might have, if it had been awake, done immense service for itself, and for Methodism, and for Christianity, and for the world. About as far as any bishop ever went was to say, as one did, that the Methodist doctrine of assurance was essentially the same as that of the Church, and to ordain, as another did, a minister to help

John Wesley, that he might prevent that good man's working himself to death.

On the other side there were arguments against Methodist enthusiasm, and protests against Wesley's not confining himself to this or that particular diocese.

Admittedly, there was not serious attempt to block the campaigning of Wesley. To that degree the English Church is entitled to credit for the evangelical awakening, to that and to the fact that Wesley was born and lived and died a son of the Church.

After all, historically speaking, this question is rather futile, for the reason that even if the Church had been well disposed toward

Wesley, it could not have given him the chance he found outside.

More than that, we must remember that the Church had been bled white four times in two centuries.

PART VII

THE SEEKER AFTER PERFECTION AND WHAT HE

FOUND "And yet I dare not preach otherwise than I do, either concerning faith, or love, or justification, or perfection."

PART VII

THE SEEKER AFTER PERFECTION AND WHAT HE

FOUND L the opening pages of this book I said that Wesley's earliest experiences were a search after the best in religious life, and that search for the best determined all that he did.

'There was something almost desperate in his quest for the highest, the first years of his ministry being largely given over to mistaken methods, or to a learning of the means by which he must work toward the ideal through imperfections in the world around him, in others, and in himself. Jeremy Taylor had, with the interpretations of Susanna Wesley, given him some sound guidance as to holy living, and William Law had sharply and definitely set before him the ideal of Christian perfection.

If this ideal, whose content we shall soon proceed to Ciscuss, had been an affair of the closet or of the cloister, it might soon have been pushed to one side in Wesley's thinking. The ideal was with Wesley to be made a reality and that in the multitudinous details of his daily evangelism.

When Wesley got away from the notion that he was preaching and working to save his own soul—though, as we have already said, it was possible grievously to misunderstand this utterance—and began to carry in his mind night and day the salvation of the souls of others, the ideal of the best came to be more and more a practical concern with him, a necessity in his work of laboring for the conversion of men. The ideal of Christian perfection took on the form of a practical expedient: the most idealistic phase of his teaching had to be used for the most practical of purposes.

What I mean is that Wesley had no sooner begun his evangelistic work than he realized that the preaching of conversion, as the term is ordinarily understood, was not enough.

Conversion was a beginning, but a beginning only.

There had to be something beyond.

The life of the people to whom Wesley preached was simple in content, somewhat impoverished, in fact. They had to have something continuing, something to strive after, an ideal which would call forth all their energies. Religious experience had to be kept interesting or it would die out.

As it was, there was a

JOHN WESLEY

terrible loss in the lists of Wesleyan converts.

At Newcastle in 1743 he "purged" two for swearing, two for Sabbath-breaking, seventeen for drunkenness, two for retailing spirituous liquors, three for quarreling, one for wife beating, three for willful lying, one for laziness, twenty-nine for lightness and carelessness—total one hundred and forty.

Eight hundred remained.

Seventeen years later at Cornwall he had lost five hundred members out of seventeen hundred.

In 1777 he wrote that about a third of his converts endured. ""T'wo thirds of those grown rich are greatly degenerated."

Now I am not saying that Wesley put Christian perfection to the forefront just for expediential and instrumental purposes.

Nevertheless he says repeatedly in the Letters that he is convinced Methodism will go to pieces without the preaching of the experience of Christian perfection.

Wesley believed in the experience interpreted in his own terms, and believed in the communicability of the experience, and believed that in any event the Christian stood in dire peril of losing all he had if he did not keep pressing forward to the highest ideal.

Whether we accept Wesley's teaching on perfection or not, we must admit the loftiness of mind and soul which could preach that the highest conceivable ideal should be made the aim of every

Christian.

There is, indeed, a sense in which the highest religious experiences are not everybody's affair, just as the highest philosophy, and science, and art are not everybody's affair.

It was the intent of Wesley, however, to get the highest in religion down within reach of the lowliest Christian. Here is the contrast between the Wesley of the earlier and the Wesley of the later days. The experiences of the Oxford Club at Oxford almost necessarily made the highest in religion the ideal of the few. Wesley definitely said to his father, when the question of the son's succeeding the father at Epworth was up, that he could best look for the nurture of his own soul at Oxford—this when John was in reading, and study, and prayer, and in good works striving for the highest and best in religious attainment. Now the distance between that life and the years when he went up and down England preaching the doctrine of Christian perfection to anybody and everybody cannot be measured.

No matter whether we today follow Wesley in his teaching on perfection or not, his willingness to cast the best he had before men everywhere is one of the fine things in the history of our religion.

Again we must often recur to the point of view that Wesley

THE SEEKER AFTER PERFECTION

had, the point of view to which he was limited, and not try to think of him as acting in the light of experiences reached through nearly two centuries of effort since his time. In every phase of his work as a revivalist Wesley was pioneering. He had no precedents. Since his day revival methods are the commonplaces of religious effort, too commonplace if anything.

Where, before Wesley, were there methods like his?

The preaching of perfection was beset with no end of difficulties.

It was a relative and not an absolute perfection, whatever that means, unless it means the highest attainable under a given set of circumstances.

There has not been any doctrine in the history of Methodism which has been hedged about with more troubles and trials than this. To begin with, it is the manifest duty of the Christian to aim at being a perfect Christian, just as it is the duty of a scientist to strive after perfect knowledge, or the duty of an artist to seek the perfect expression of beauty. The words of Jesus cannot be interpreted away which tell us to be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect. Even if the words were to be explained away, the command would be binding from the nature of moral insight itself.

In the next place, nobody can fulfill the ideal of perfection perfectly. Wesley used to say that Christian perfection meant that we should have all the mind which was in Christ. Who can do that?

Here we may as well accept the judgment of James that the facts of human experience and observation do not warrant such claim.

There was not enough difference between the life of those who made such claim and those who had not to justify such exalted claim.

Again, when a Christian proposes that he is perfect, the proposition is itself a sign that he isnot. A man who says that he is perfect as a Christian, in the saying-so reveals that he is not.

'The insistence of Wesley that the Christian must push on to perfection was alto_ gether sound, but Wesley had not gone far in the preaching before he had to make so many qualifications to fit the teaching into actual life that it became a fountainhead of confusion.

There is not much spiritual edification to be found in most Methodist exposition of perfection.

The perfectionist is likely, especially, to resent any criticism of the use of the word "perfection." If the teachers of what is apparently meant by perfection could have contented themselves with some other word, a deal of unprofitable controversy could have

JOHN WESLEY

been avoided. To be sure, we are at liberty to use words according to our own definitions, if we keep the definition clearly out before us, but this is hard to do when we are handling words which have a fairly well-agreed-upon meaning in ordinary usage.

It might be permissible for me to use the word "'circle" as if it meant "'square," but it would not be an especially rational performance to attempt to do so, even if I repeated my definition every time I used the word; and if I did this, I should probably find myself saying "'circle'"' as if it meant "circle," and that would make trouble enough.

I have never known any professed perfectionist to use the word "'perfection," no matter with what announced qualifications, without every now and again seeming to mean just what the ordinary person would mean by it.

For illustration, one of the most elaborate treatises on perfection published in the last quarter century makes the essential in its definition of perfection "unbroken communion with God." This is, however, just one item in a full definition, and a somewhat dubious item at that.

It is at least conceivable that an imperfect moral character might have unbroken communion through an imperfect medium.

If one of the glories of human life is power to speak through the imperfect, that glory must belong to God in supreme measure.

Wesley no sooner began to preach perfection than he found it necessary to explain what he meant. He always somewhat elaborately explained what he did not mean. First of all, he said, he did not mean sinlessness.

Whitefield thought he did, which meant that Whitefield was not satisfied with Wesley's statement.

Wesley said he meant by perfection freedom from intentional sin.

This does not seem to be enough to warrant all the controversial uproar.

We make the assumption of freedom from intentional sin concerning ourselves and concerning our neighbors and friends and even our casual acquaintances daily, for in our own normal dealings with our fellow men we assume good faith all around. There is abundant falling from good faith every day, but there is nevertheless this universal assumption of good faith. Any of us would feel insulted to learn that he was suspected of intentionally doing wrong in his daily contact, or of lacking good faith in his dealing with his fellows.

If that is all perfection means, why all the discussion?

Wesley said that by perfection he did not mean freedom from liability to mistake through faultiness of judgment.

Here, again, we wonder what the agelong debate is about.

This assumption is so common again that in all discussion, for example, we are to

THE SEEKER AFTER PERFECTION

make a distinction between the personal and the impersonal, and to consider questions impersonally on their merits without any hint of reflection on the holder of the opinions, no matter how mistaken they may be.

This distinction, by the way, has been and is one of the most fruitful agreements as to discussion in a democracy. It takes much of the bitterness out of debate, through relieving the debaters of question as to their personal demerit in case of fallacious reasoning.

This, however, is not the whole story, suggestive and helpful as it may be as far as it goes. It does not go far enough. For there are situations in which we must hold the makers of mistakes blamable for the mistakes.

One of the most urgent and insistent needs of this present automobile world is that upon the highways travelers shall not make mistake.

It is not a question of merely holding blunderers responsible for their blunders, but of keeping men from making blunders!—for if a blunderer so blunders as to cause the death of one of his fellow men, there is no way that holding the blunderer responsible can bring the dead man back to life.

In other words, seekers after the highest Christian ideal can never in any convincing degree talk of perfection so long as they make mistakes harmful to their fellows. A man might conceivably persuade himself of the complete uprightness of his own intention and yet be a positive menace to the community in which he lives. He is responsible, not merely for the point of departure of his act in his own intention, but for the point at which the act arrives in outer consequence.

The moral life, which is, of course, the center of Christian effort, has several different angles from which we can view it, and judge it. There is the moral purpose, the spirit of good will, to speak in the New Testament meaning. This is the absolute feature, without which there is no reason in talking of moral character.

A moral man aims to do right in all forms of his activity. He must - do right with all that there is of him.

A second factor is the aim to determine by all the light available what should be done in a given set of circumstances.

This demands the pursuit of all the truth within reach.

'This introduces difficulties beyond that of intention. A man may have a full intention to do right, but he may not have exerted himself to the utmost to determine what is right at a given time and place. If the will to do right is called absolute, this content of what the right actually 1s

JOHN WESLEY

must be called relative.

It demands a firmer and finer moral quality to deal with the relative here than with the absolute.

Back of all this, and around it, is the growing ideal of the Christ-life as the guide for human life. Wesley called this "all the mind of Christ.' In the nature of Christianity, this "all" must be all the time growing. It means far, far more for us today than it could possibly have meant for Wesley himself.

Again, we have come to see that living according to the mind in Christ means making Christian those deep and hidden springs of our natures out of which impulses and stirrings of will arise. It is this last phase of the problem which makes the struggle for Christian character today more hopeful and yet at the same time more serious.

The more penetrating of the teachers of perfection have always been aware that the heart of the difficulty has been with what has been called original or inborn sin. Wesley himself recognized this, but he never seemed to clear up, if not his thinking, at least his speech about this aspect of the difficulty. That difficulty is that —and who can improve the words of Saint Paul?—when we would do good, evil is present with us.

Much of the confusion has come from our getting the ideas of guilt and inborn evil, or tendencies to evil, tied up together.

If sin is inborn, we are no more responsible for it than we are to blame for physical deformities with which we are born.

Wesley was, of course, right in insisting that guilt has to do with our own wills.

In the next breath, however, we have to admit that acquiescence in our admitted imperfection is itself a choice of will, and an evil choice.

The problem in Christian character, so far as concerns the individual, is to carry the Christian ideal down into what modern psychology calls the subconscious realm.

'This term is not at all satisfactory, but we know what it means.

Of course there are those who tell us that our responsibility for this realm is owing to the fact that what comes up to us from below consciousness has been previously in full consciousness, and has gone down into the subconscious by our allowing it to do so.

Thence it comes back up into clear consciousness fully matured, none of which would have happened if we had not, at least to a degree, been hospitable to the suggestion in the first place. That there is truth here it would be impossible to gainsay, but not the whole truth.

Suggestions come upon us without our realizing their presence till we think of them afterward.

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What I wish to insist upon, however, is that, no matter how this phase of our nature came to be what it is, we may be in one sense not responsible for it at all, and in another, responsible for the attitude we take toward it.

It is the acquiescent adjustment to what we are which is a contradiction to the ideal.

Let us refer again to an illustration which may at first seem somewhat apart from a predominantly moral struggle, namely, that of Sir Isaac Newton's remark about the limitations of his own knowledge. He said that he felt like a child picking up a few pebbles beside the shore of the ocean of knowledge while the vast deep, the unknown, stretched out before him. Now, this did not mean that Newton did not recognize the genuineness of the pebbles of truth that he possessed. Among those pebbles were the binomial theorem, the universality of gravitation, and certain principles of optics. Newton's admission of ignorance in the expression quoted did not prevent his fighting most valiantly for the truth he had already gained, or prevent his determined search for as much more of the truth of the ocean of knowledge as he could explore. Newton worked on the assumption, commonplace in science, that every item of the ocean of truth, every drop of it, so to speak, was in itself intelligible, beyond the range of any one human intelligence indeed and yet fundamentally intelligible.

As a scientist, Newton gave himself to unending exploration of the sea of knowledge.

The illustration falls short, but it does have value.

It seems at times as if, to use the phrase of William James, the dam between the human consciousness and the sea of life around the human were by some agency so lowered that the "Mother Sea" presses in, revealing some of its infinite vastness.

James thought of this '""Mother Sea" in terms that would make it essentially divine.

It we were to think of it thus, we should say that Christian duty consisted in welcome to it and surrender toit. At times, however, this psychical sea seems to be of a different order.

It was James himself who told us that the impressions from the world around us storm upon us in one big buzzing confusion.

It is the duty of the rational mind to meet this confusion on the threshold of consciousness and to rule it into order, compelling it to yield its secrets and to make sense.

Similarly, it is the duty of the Christian will to meet all the storm of moral stimulus and rule it in the name of Christ. The problem is so to handle the nature of ourselves that our bringing the Christspirit to bear upon our impulses becomes what we call second nature.

The work of redemption is not complete till all there is

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of our lives and characters acts according to the spirit of Christ.

The task has to be handled with wisdom.

Just to show how in discussing we almost inevitably fall into contradiction, may I recall what I have said about the moral fault of acquiescing in our admitted imperfection.

I do not withdraw my remark, but I have to qualify it with another which seems contradictory.

There are imperfections which are beyond our reach, as there are bodily infirmities which we cannot change.

Take the problem of body itself.

What a tangled realm we get into when we think of the influence of the body on the mind, and upon the moral life! There are moral peculiarities which come out of a subtle influence of the body. The body may not be strong enough to furnish the basis for anything like a normal moral experience.

The body, on the other hand, may be too strong, too wild in itself, too riotous for a moral career at all ideal. How far shall a man acquiesce in bodily conditions which he cannot control?

'The ordinary, steady life does not have the data for judgment here.

By the way, we who have sound physical organisms may be indebted to the organisms themselves for what seems to be moral steadiness.

Now, Wesley defined perfection as perfection in love, love to God and to one's neighbor.

For the most part, after the emphasis on perfection had come to be central in his religious teaching, he kept himself to this most important phase of the teaching of Jesus, that we are to love God with all there is of us—mind, heart, soul, and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves.

A nobler, more genuinely Christian ideal could not be found. Who could aim at anything higher than perfection in such love?

The difficulties and divisions and confusions began when Wesley started to preach perfection as an attainable experience here and now.

It is, of course, entirely conceivable that a Christian might love God and man with all his powers, but it is questionable whether one doing so might not be taking too little a view of the ideal. When the Wesleyans began to define perfection, they usually limited it so that they might just as well have used some other name. I repeat that the perfectionists always seem irritated, in spite of their perfection, when one tries to expound their doctrine from the point of view of the customary meaning of perfection.

We are thinking, however, of the practical outworking of this preaching in the days of Wesley, and we cannot help seeing that the ordinary hearers put into the term meanings suggested by the customary use.

Look back at the marks of the moral life on

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which we can agree—the central will to do right which is absolutely binding in every life; the obligation to find the solution, relative to every situation; the expanding ideal of the Christ revelation.

Wesley complained to Edward Perronet in 1750 that he had not six men who had their wills broken enough to serve him as sons in the gospel. Assuming that we do love God with all there is of us in the central intent of our lives, the old, old question as to the neighbor recurs, not merely as to who the neighbor is but as to what we shall do to show love for him.

When the perfection movement spread pretty well throughout the Methodist societies, increasing numbers of members began to claim that they had received this power, or blessing, of Christian perfection, and many of them averred that they had received it instantaneously.

A rough-and-ready common sense might have protested against such claims, but Wesley was too open-minded for that.

As I have said time and'again, he did not close the door of his mind against anything which claimed to come from God.

His openmindedness did not preclude the most careful questioning on his part, but he did not close the questioning against the claim till he had heard all the evidence he could.

Naturally, then, Wesley listened to these witnesses who claimed that they enjoyed the experience of perfection in love.

He had to handle forthwith many knotty puzzles. The scheme of any moral life which I outlined above, and which Wesley accepted, had to make room for growth.

If life has to be thought of as always growing, if the will can become stronger, if the devotion to God can become deeper, if love for men can become more of a ruling passion, then life can become absolutely perfect only as to fixity of direction.

That would be enough, it would seem, but I am not sure that Wesley himself did not mean more than that.

As in all these matters, we have to get back to Wesley's own times and to the ideas which he could not help breathing out of the thought-atmosphere in which he lived.

Wesley had as a background the deistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, though he was the unyielding foe of deism as such.

For the deist, God had created the universe and had then left it to care for itself, a machine virtually self-running.

On the other hand, Wesley felt that God was always at hand to intervene, if need be. Nobody, of Wesley's intellectual standing I mean, ever made freer use of the idea of divine intervention—so free use that, indeed, he nearly cheapened that idea.

He was once about to open a service in the

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open air and rain began to fall. A word of prayer, and the rain stopped.

On another occasion, while he was preaching, the sun smote heavily upon his bared head.

He prayed, and a cloud covered the sky. Wesley would not in this have seen a miracle—with miracle defined as a setting aside of law—for he always insisted that only "enthusiasm" could hold that ends could be achieved without the appropriate means, but he conceived of God as using the laws of the universe for any special providence for which a believer might pray.

There did not seem to be any difficulty in Wesley's mind with the notion that, if the believer prayed for Christian perfection, the petition might be forthwith granted. The possibility of receiving this blessing in the twinkling of an eye appealed to him most powerfully.

Just to show how his general theological system played into his interpretation of Christian perfection, we note that Wesley maintained that, if perfection were not reached in this special experience, it would have to be arrived at in the hour of death, when, according to Wesley, it was granted to most, if not all, Christians. We see here that the notion of the eternal life, or conditions in paradise or heaven, were working in Wesley's mind to determine the interpretation of psychological experience.

It would not do for Christians to enter heaven without having attained to perfection, taking Wesley's definition of perfection as loving God with all the heart and one's neighbor as oneself. Just how such an experience of Christian perfection was to be achieved at death would be utterly beyond any experimental test.

The dying man could not tell it: observation from outside would be impossible.

I give this point an importance altogether beyond any inherent worth in it just for the sake of the glimpse it grants us of the activity of Wesley's mind on one of its stranger sides; perhaps we would better say a glimpse of the extent to which Wesley would allow a speculative consideration to influence his construction of what would have to be an actual psychological experience.

The requirements of the Christian heaven had to be considered in deciding what was possible to souls here on earth.

It must be admitted, however, that Wesley believed that divine power could deal with freedom with earthly factors, including the factors of man's actual constitution asaman.

It can be doubted whether, with all his seriousness, Wesley took the problem of perfection seriously enough.

This seems an odd thing to say of a life whose every breath was for the uplift of his fellow men, who paid himself out in service of those fellow

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men; but the judgment is warranted, especially when we think of what such an experience would call for in acceptance of responsibility for the welfare of all men within reach. Wesley never taught that all inbred sin was to be removed, all tendency to evil taken away, every taint of "corruption" washed out merely that the soul thus perfected could enjoy such a spiritual luxury, but he did not consider sufficiently enough the effects of such a life in the human relationships.

How lives transformed by the perfection of love toward their fellow men ever could continue to be adjusted to a world like that of the eighteenth century without constantly crying out against it is one of the mysteries.

Wesley was too easily content with triumphing over this world by turning the back upon it. When we look at the astonishing work of grace necessary to render a Christian free from all tendencies to evil, we may well wonder if such grace, received under a feeling of Christian trusteeship, could lead to a soul's turning inward upon itself and not outward upon the needs of a distressed world.

It is possible here to use the old, old fallacy that it is better to be than to do, a fallacy to which so many pleaders for character as such are fond of resorting. The adage is a comfortable one indeed to all who turn away from the needs of the world.

Returning to the feature of the instantaneous, which was so notable in Wesley's teaching about perfection, we must remark that this emphasis had pronounced effect upon Methodism's search for religious experience. Anything which resembled or suggested a sharp crisis, anything, in a word, happening suddenly, came to be regarded as especially divine in its origin.

Here we must concede that this notion came from the deistic tendencies of the time, but, if so, it was re-enforced by Wesley's positive stress on instantaneousness. Wesley had to admit that there was a gradual work preceding this instantaneous operation of grace, and that there was a growth following it; and he had a hard time giving the pre-eminence to the instantaneous. A lot of the exposition here, especially that in correspondence with Charles Wesley, has an air of unreality, even of pious and unintentional frivolity.

There has been some criticism of Wesley for encouraging overintrospection and absorption in spiritual exercises looking to the development of one's own soul.

Here again we have to make discriminations which are taxing to ourselves and probably not convincing to readers.

That the result of Wesley's teaching was overintrospection there can be little doubt, but Wesley did not aim at

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self-scrutiny for the sake of the soul itself.

Much that he said sounds as if this were his intent, but that intent was fundamentally redemptive, evangelistic.

The men whom he selected to preach his teaching were put on months of trial, not to see just what inner grace they could develop, but to train them in leading men to accept Christ.

It is fair to use here an illustration from the realm of art. A violinist or pianist gives himself to anxious self-scrutiny in the most arduous, even the most painful training, not for any delight of his own but for the sake of learning to make a channel for his music out to the world.

Here, again, so intricate is this realm, we come upon the reminder that, if a man does too much of this introspection, even for the purpose of helping others, he spoils his instrumental effectiveness.

'Too much sharpening of the sword harms the edge.

Moreover, the constant introspection, for which I will not say that Wesley has the sole responsibility, led the Methodist to take himself too seriously.

Unless this whole exercise of introspection is held easily, and at times even with considerable humor, it throws the believer altogether out of perspective and focus concerning himself.

In 1762 Wesley wrote: "To set perfection too high is the quickest way of driving it out of the world."

Now we come to the most controverted part of the Methodist attitude toward Christian perfection, namely, the testimony of some to having attained the experience.

Wesley received such testimonies in all good faith and genuine hospitality; though, as he went on in his career, he found it necessary to speak positively, almost sharply, to some of the claimants.

The logic of the claim seemed sure enough, namely, that if a Christian could have the assurance that he was Christian, why could he not also have assurance that he was wholly, or perfectly Christian? A little consideration of the implications of this reasoning might have indicated how far it fell short of being convincing.

'To know that one is perfect in any definition of perfection, one would need to possess virtually perfection of knowledge—perfect perspective, perfect familiarity with all that might be in consciousness at any instant, and with all that might be below the threshold at the same moment; perfect poise.

Wesley had said that Christian perfection did not imply perfection of knowledge or understanding or insight.

It is not, however, just a playing with words to ask how an admittedly imperfect mind could pass on the perfection of a soul when that soul might be uttering judgment on itself. Remember, revelation here

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would have to come along the channel of a perfectly sound judgment.

The situation would not be like that of flashing a picture upon a screen to be seen by an onlooker. It would be more like a message to be read off, implying the power to read.

In an earlier paragraph I said that, if a man professed to be altogether perfect, in the Wesleyan meaning, we could be pretty sure he was not perfect. The reason for this judgment is that the assertion of such attainment is likely to manifest a spiritual selfsufficiency which is altogether out of keeping with Christian humility.

Phillips Brooks once preached a searching sermon on the text, "Is It I?" the passage being the question which the disciples asked of Jesus when he told them, on the night of the Last Supper, that one of them would betray him.

The theme of Brooks was that the closer the disciple gets to Christ, the more vividly he realizes the possibility of not being fully loyal to him.

'This did not imply that Brooks meant that the possibilities of evil in a believer's heart are so overwhelming as to keep him in terror, but that only the pursuer of the ideal sees how far short of the ideal he falls, and the possibilities that come out of that distance between ideal and attainment.

With the true disciple, who understands what discipleship really involves, the query is relevant as to how any disciple could actually raise the question as to whether he had already reached perfection or not.

To ask some questions is to make a significant revelation of one's own limitations.

Suppose we look at the problem for a moment through an illustration from the sphere of art. Here is a painter ora sculptor who has practiced all his life to put into expression his conception of beauty. Suppose he should ask himself, "Have I attained perfection?" Such a question might naturally leap into the mind of an artist, or, indeed, it might have haunted his consciousness through the years. The question might, indeed, be a statement of the artist's ideal, for what would an artist amount to if he did not strive for the ideal?

Can we imagine an artist of the first order, by which we would mean one who had gone highest in the judgment of those qualified to have an opinion, entertaining for an instant the fancy that he had attained perfection? He might say to himself that he had done the best he could, and that he therefore could not go any higher. Was

not Thorwaldsen who, when he felt that he had at last done the best he could, fell into despair, avowing that the feeling of satisfaction was a sentence of doom?

The best critics might, indeed, say that the work of a particular artist was final; nothing could surpass

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it. Indeed, we know that some types of statues, like the Venus of Milo, or some types of building, like the more significant cathedrals, seem to exhaust the possibilities in given directions.

In this meaning, an achievement may be perfect as having exhausted the possibilities in a given direction.

Likewise, a Christian may achieve a perfect result in a particular deed. Whether that is Christian perfection, however, in the fulfillment of the moral ideal, is possibly another matter.

; I am quite sure that some readers have long since become weary with what may seem to be the repetitious nature of this chapter, with its qualifications and tangles and apparent contradictions.

I bespeak the reader's patience.

'The teaching of Christian perfection has, on the side of religious experience, been looked upon as the original contribution of Wesley to the world.

It is well, then, that we look at it, not only from the angle of his own teaching but, from our larger knowledge of the workings of the human soul which science possesses today, that we may see better the aims and achievements and limitations of the Wesleyan teaching.

We say, therefore, that, in the next place, those who taught that the experience of perfection could be recognized by its witness to itself and that it was a duty to testify to it as an achieved result, did not take enough into their account the temptations which come with the growth into higher life.

'To take a simple illustration: there are temptations which arise out of sheer selfishness, or the grosser impulses. The Methodist thought of sin in rather restricted fashion so far as actual transgressions were concerned.

Lapses into bodily evils of the more sensual type were above all others serious.

There are temptations, however, coming out of unselfishness, out of desire to please others. All the temptations of Jesus seem to have been of this order, like those in the wilderness when his whole aim was to find the method by which he could best do the redemptive work for his people; like that where Peter virtually told him to put aside the cross, the temptation taking on renewed force because it came on the lips of a dear friend and loved disciple.

Moreover, the ascent into the higher reaches of spiritual life calls for a finer balance.

The loftier the height, the more dangerous the slip. A Christian might reach a plane on which the grosser impulses meant nothing to him at all, and yet be exposed to subtle appeals to evil which the man battling with the lower impulses might, on the other hand, not understand.

This latter might not know of the

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possibility of the higher perils, or what they would be like if they were possible.

Aside from this finer aspect, Wesley laid too much stress on asceticism, or upon a near-asceticism, as the sum and substance of Christian duty to be entitled to be accepted as a teacher of a sound doctrine of perfection. The content was not large enough.

It was too negative. A leader who repeatedly enjoins women not to wear ribbons or who takes time to write a voluminous denunciation of tea drinking has his perspective askew. A searcher after the perfect life ought to be sure that his purposes are not only sure enough, but big enough. They ought to be chiefly positive.

It is true that, in spite of his asceticism, Wesley himself did live a marvelously full life.

It is even said, on what seems to be unquestionable authority, that he left among his papers notes on Shakespeare's plays, or some of them.

John Pawson, as we have previously said, a sturdy Methodist, found them and destroyed them as "useless baggage." The notes were quite possibly not of high value except for the light they might have thrown on Wesley's own mind.

There is something amusing, though, in Pawson's throwing out the notes.

There is not much in Pawson's record to suggest that he would know whether they were baggage or not. He was a rough, vigorous preacher whom Wesley, in later years, "ordained" to work in Scotland; who rejoiced in his power and dignities until he had to return to England, where Wesley would apparently not recognize the ordination which had professedly been valid in Scotland.

Pawson showed some human and natural peevishness in giving up the "gowns" and "bands" and the title of "Reverend," which he seems to have enjoyed while they lasted.

Wesley never ceased to think of the Christian life as a field for at least a mild form of asceticism and this conception colored the search for the perfect experience.

For Wesley himself, disciplined as he was, asceticism came naturally.

For many of the Wesley followers asceticism was of the ordinary lot. They did not have much

of this world's goods. The entire emphasis, however, tended to an other-worldliness which is not a mark of perfection.

Much of Methodism was an inheritance from Puritanism, and Puritanism of those days, important and necessary as it was, was too solemn to suggest the perfect life. The Puritan ideal has to be supplemented with something else if it is to be held as a Christian aim throughout a lifetime.

Wesley's frowning upon pleasantry in speech, to say nothing of his displeasure at wit or humor, did not make for

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the soundest life.

'Too much was thus left out.

Moreover, when a man will not allow himself to be even for an instant a conscious humorist, he is likely to end by being an unconscious one—which may be calamitous.

If Wesley had been a little more definitely and purposely open to the funny side of things, we might have been spared that oft-quoted remark in his Journal which tells us that, in an attack upon his coach by a mob, he was providentially kept from harm from flying stones by the fact that a fat woman sat upon his lap. That was in 1752, when Wesley was about fifty.

Did Wesley ever claim to have attained to perfection?

We have said he never did. This has been a sore puzzle to many claimants of perfection and to many students of Wesley's life.

One writer, the late Professor O. A. Curtis, declares that a certain experience described in the Journal must have been that of the arrival at perfection.

The passage is as follows: December 24, 1744—"I saw every thought, as well as every action or word, just as it was rising in my heart; and whether it was right before God, or tainted with pride and selfishness." Tuesday, 25th—"I waked, by the grace of God, in the same spirit; and about eight .

. I felt such an awe and tender sense of the presence of God .

. that God was before me all the day long.

I sought and found Him in every place."

This is interesting, but not at all convincing, inasmuch as the experience there set forth does not bear out what Wesley states perfection to be.

He has, by the way, suffered much from those who have sought to classify his experiences for him.

If, in all these matters, we stick to the facts as he described them, we shall be better off.

In everything he says we note the workings of a realistic temper.

Here is his word in 1765: '""When I was young I was sure of everything. Ina few years, having been mistaken a thousand times,

I was not half as sure of most things as I was before: at present I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to man."

Wesley was clearly open to any religious claims that were genuinely and sincerely put forward, but he would not make any claim for himself of which he did not feel sure. We have here a most noteworthy instance of his poise. No leader in the history of the Church ever acted as if he were more sure of himself.

There was always the assumption of his own leadership, without any question whatever.

At first thought we might have said that Wesley would be just the one to claim that he had attained to Christian perfection.

He did not, however, make any such claim.

It isa strange situation

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we confront here—a man preaching through half a century an experience as the heart of the Methodist belief and practice, and yet never claiming to have received the grace himself. At one time he encouraged his followers to bear witness to this blessing, and at others he urged virtual silence about it. "There must have been pressure put upon him to make a statement concerning his own search for the experience, but there is no hint of such pressure either in the Journal or Letters.

Did the followers of Wesley assume that he himself had the type of religious life which he so vigorously urged upon them? Or were they content to let Wesley be what he might be, and say what he might say, and ask no questions?

There is no way of answering these queries. Probably in some aspects of his life Wesley thoroughly understood himself.

There is at least not much suggestion of uncertainty about himself. Even in the days when he says that he was walking in darkness—and we have to remember that in those days he declares that he did not have sleepless nights—he held to his purposes with complacent fixity.

In the midst of his self-depreciations he never reveals any trace of impulse to give up in despair, so far as his central purposes are concerned.

His close relatives, like his sister and his brother Samuel, might be shocked when he said, as he did even after Aldersgate, that he was not a Christian and had not been; but he did not give the least sign of giving up his strivings.

He went ahead living a Christian life. Wesley knew of his devotion to the Christian ideal.

At Aldersgate one feature of the experience was an assurance that he did trust Christ.

He knew that, but he may have felt unwilling to make claims for himself that he encouraged others to make if they could do so in good faith.

'Tyerman avows that in May, 1738, after Aldersgate, Wesley "was much buffeted with temptations which returned again and again."

Of course it is possible to ask insistently and repeatedly if one cannot have an assurance of perfection inasmuch as one can have an assured conviction of one's salvation.

There is a world of difference between such phases of assurance.

It would be the height of absurdity to say that we, who sincerely accept Christ as the guide of our lives, could not be warranted in that acceptance.

Consciousness of devotion to the Christ ideal is far different, though, from arrival at a final goal. The one testimony means everything: the other may raise so much question as practically to mean nothing at all. A foremost exponent of Wesleyan perfection in this country used to profess that he knew he was entirely sanctified up to the

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measure of his self-knowledge.

This came from a most worthy man who, however, was not as fully informed as to his own qualities as were those who looked upon his life from the outside. Taken by itself, the testimony is about of the same value as if a man should say that he was in perfect physical health up to the measure of his self-knowledge.

'This is a realm in which personal assurance about oneself does not count for much.

It is perhaps interesting for those who like to argue everything out to the last inch that Wesley was once asked by a philosophically-minded follower if Christian perfection meant the elimination of all inbred evil. Wesley said yes. The inquirer then asked if a child born to parents from whom all trace of inbred sin had been removed by the grace of Christian perfection, would have any trace of inbred sin. Wesley did not answer.

If we wish to sum up what can safely be said about Wesley and Christian perfection, we can put it down that this perfection was the chief aim of Wesley's teaching and work; that it was the highest ideal which he held before himself. We see also that he paid human nature the immense compliment of assuming that it could be made perfect—an enormous assumption even with all the qualifications which Wesley insisted upon.

It may be worth while to note here the doctrine of Karl Marx as to human perfectibility.

Marx, who wrote about half a century after Wesley had disappeared from the scene, taught that the so-called evil of human nature was due to the environment of men.

There is no record that Marx ever paid the slightest attention to Wesley, but the contrast of his teaching as over against that of Wesley at least catches the attention. Marx taught that, with environment changed, man's nature would change as a matter of course.

Wesley assumed that environment counted for little or nothing in the change of human nature, that this change was wholly from within by the grace of God. The Marxian point of view would probably not have been intelligible to Wesley. His whole mind was absorbed in the approach from the opposite direction.

Continuing the summary, we may say that, along with this high idealism and high expectancy as to human nature, Wesley was in an extraordinary degree realistic.

'This worked in two ways in his dealing with people: it made him open to whatever they might testify to, and open in caution and rebuke also when the "witnesses" to exalted experiences were showing signs of any temper which did not fit in with their claims.

As to himself, Wesley's

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realistic temper it was which probably prevented his making any final claim. Some oddly thinking persons have sought to make out that Wesley was not quite sincere in holding up to his followers an ideal to which he did not profess to have reached.

Ifa man, however, believes that an ideal can be attained by men, and believes from the testimony of men that they have thus attained, the charge against him that he is not sincere in advocating the belief is wrongly drawn. The most that can fairly be alleged is that he is mistaken.

After long years of experience with those professing the experience, Wesley seriously modified his way of speaking of it, as appears from the following quotation: March 15, 1770: "Many hundreds in London were made partakers of it, within sixteen or eighteen months; but I doubt whether twenty of them are now as holy and happy as they were."

It is evident that the difficulties about the teaching arose from the nature and degree of its realization in actual human life. 'These difficulties clung like a blight upon Methodism for a hundred and fifty years.

Various groups of interpreters of the doctrine were continually falling afoul of one another.

Methodism brought peace to thousands upon thousands in their relation to the Divine; but, paradoxically enough, not so much peace in the relation of these Christians one to another.

In congregation after congregation the scandal arose that those who professed perfection in love, quarreled and fought with one another.

Wesley himself once raised the question as to whether he should not altogether drop the preaching of Christian perfection.

Certainly, in 1768 in another context he declared that "perfection is not joy."

Yet the ideal itself has been the glory of Methodism.

would have been in extreme degree questionable and tragic if a forward movement in religion like Methodism had made no mention of perfection. When one picks up a book on political obligations by such a writer on abstract philosophy as Thomas Hill Green, for - example, and finds him telling about the quest for perfection as influencing the development of States, and when one notes how often the idea of perfection appears as a driving force among those who labor in the artistic realm, one can only feel grateful for a religious leadership that definitely placed the ideal of perfection in Christian life on high before the people called Methodists.

'The definition may have been faulty, and the methods askew, and the outcome anything but ideal; but all these shortcomings could be

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corrected.

Anything but let the ideal fall!

Wesley kept it from falling.

Wesley finally got his idea of perfection into the scriptural terms of loving God with all the life—mind, heart, soul, and strength and the neighbor as oneself.

If one could do that, one would certainly have met all Christian requirements.

When we get away from the metaphysical refinements about the difference between inbred sin and guilt, and all the rest of such futile material, and look at what Wesley did, we see just about as adequate a commentary on what perfection would mean as any we can find in the history of the Church.

The love of God and the love of man were certainly held together.

The witness to Wesley himself of any attainment of perfection in an ""experience" would have been, in any event, negligible as compared with the satisfaction which he found in pouring himself to the utmost in love to God and service to men.

How strange it is that it was only when those detached from religious connections altogether began to praise Wesley's emphasis on perfection in ideal and work that the respectably good began to see the greatness of the Methodist leader!

There is something ironical in that the skeptically inclined, like John Richard Green and W. H. Lecky and Leslie Stephen, were among the first to assess Wesley's achievements at their true value.

The parts in parentheses in the following letter are in cipher, presumably so that only his brother Charles could read them.

Under date of June 27, 1766, he wrote to Charles:

I do not feel the wrath of God abiding on me, nor can I believe it does. And yet (this is the mystery) (I do not love God. I never did.)

Therefore (I never) believed in the Christian sense of the word. Therefore (I am only an honest heathen, a proselyte of the Temple, one of the g~oBotuevor tov Hedy (God fearers).

And yet to be so employed of God! and so hedged in that I can get neither forward nor backward!

Surely there never was such an instance before from the beginning of the world!

(If I ever have had) that faith it would not be so strange.

But (I never have had any) other £Aeyxog of the eternal or invisible world than (I have) now; and that is (none at all), unless such as fairly shines from reason's glimmering ray!

(I have no) direct witness, I do not say that (I am a child of God) but of anything invisible or eternal.

And yet I dare not preach otherwise than I do, either concerning faith, or love, or justification, or perfection.

And yet I find rather an increase than a decrease of zeal for the whole work of God and every part of it. Iam epduevog (borne along), I know not how that I can't

THE SEEKER AFTER PERFECTION

stand still.

I want all the world to come to év ov oida (What I do not know). Neither am I impelled to do this by fears of any kind.

I have no more fear than love.

Or if I have (any fear, it is not that of falling) into hell but of falling into nothing. .. . Press the instantaneous blessing.

Now, this presents us with an important problem, far beyond the personal in its significance, namely, the relation between Wesley's own religious experience and what he preached himself and called on his preachers to preach.

First of all, there can be no doubt of Wesley's entire good faith in this letter to Charles.

I mean that he is speaking the truth about himself as far as he knows it. He is evidently keeping nothing back.

The Journal of Wesley is one of the world's outstanding religious documents, but it has one shortcoming for religious effect.

It was purposely written for the edification of the Wesleyans. The most self-revealing diary in the English language is that of Samuel

Pepys.

Pepys was not writing for any eye except his own, at least not for any that would read the diary till long after he should be gone. With moral self-revelation such as that of Pepys, we do not wonder that he did not care to have anyone who had ever personally known him see what his pages contained.

Now, there are profound revelations of religious experiences in the eight big volumes of Wesley's Journal, but all were elaborations of notes made in the diary, with the spiritual help of the Methodists in mind.

With the utmost honesty and candor and sincerity in the world, a document written with a purpose of such edification has its serious limitations.

The language used has to be intelligible to the readers.

Moreover, it has to be such as will suggest a given type of experience.

Now, Wesley was always talking about assurance, and the need of it—assurance as to conversion and the presence of _God in the life, and even the assurance of having attained perfection.

Social scientists, in talking about the service of Wesley in individualism, say that, of course, Wesley overdid the emphasis on assurance, but we should always remember the services to democracy.

Of course we should, but we are now trying to form some estimate of the services distinctively religious. We have to ask whether the preaching and teaching of Wesley tended to hold out expectations to seeking souls which, in the nature of men's minds, could not always, or for the most part, be realized.

JOHN WESLEY

It is all but self-evident that this letter of John to Charles came out of depression.

'The physical resources of one who never rests finally run low.

When the tides of bodily strength are out, the mind is like a stretch of barren sand. Wesley ought to have admitted more often his moods of depression.

Many, many men have such moods but not all of them are preaching a doctrine of assurance that does not seem to make place for depression. 'There is no doubt that, in his remarks about many of his own peculiarities, Wesley has to be discounted.

A student of his life, Rev. F. F. Bretherton, has tabulated over sixty entries in the Journal which have to do with the illnesses of Wesley, serious illnesses too, so serious that Wesley himself on several occasions concluded that death was at hand.

How to fit these entries into that famous utterance about never having lost a quarter of an hour's sleep is a puzzle.

It is easy to say that we ought to remember the limitations of human speech and not make ordinary language as hard and fast as a legal statute, or a scientific law.

All this we heartily admit, but Wesleyanism worked toward a standardized set of religious experiences, and these resulted partly from the definiteness of the speech of Wesley himself.

Anybody who has ever had much to do with Methodists who have taken their religion earnestly knows the spiritual distress into which many of them have been plunged by the oversharpness of Methodist testimony as to the presence of God.

Bishop Butler once said to John Wesley that the claim to receiving special revelations from God was a "'very horrid thing, sir, a very horrid thing."

'Taking the words just as they stand, generation after generation of Methodists have been fond of treating these words of Butler's as spiritual obtuseness.

'Taken as they were intended, and under the circumstances in which Bishop Butler spoke, they were what Wesley needed to hear.

'The pathetic, bewildered search of some men, and women and children—especially children—after an assurance encouraged by Wesley's preaching has been not a "very horrid thing," indeed, but a very distressing thing.

Suppose now that, instead of writing the above in a confidential cipher to Charles, Wesley had frankly said the same thing publicly.

He would have forestalled harm.

He could have admitted the testimony of many, many Methodists to experiences more striking than anything he himself had ever felt. Wesley was most careful in his claims as to direct, personal crises.

Most of his claims to divine guidance were in the field of interpretation, which could be questioned or doubted without any reflection upon him-

THE SEEKER AFTER PERFECTION

self. For example, Wesley's avowal that a rainstorm which changed its course so as not to interfere with his open-air service was a direct divine interposition, could be accepted or not as a hearer might decide for himself.

Preaching a positiveness of assurance of salvation, which might or might not be possible to a majority of persons in a congregation, was quite different.

Here we come upon a peculiarity of Wesley's leadership which must have been more or less deliberate.

While Wesley was kindness itself in dealing with individuals who sought his personal counsel, he did not seem to concern himself to hold fast to his societies those who could not fit themselves into the Methodist frame.

He appeared to feel that, if men could not adjust themselves to the Methodist ways, they would better go elsewhere.

Not that he asked them to go elsewhere.

Again it must be remembered always that Wesley took himself as the founder of a society and not of a Church.

A Church cannot properly give itself to the exclusive development of any one religious doctrine, or feeling, or method.

There cannot be any doubt that Wesley believed that the assurance he preached was attainable. He believed that it was taught by the Scriptures and that it was witnessed to by countless Methodists.

Yet, if his letter to his brother meant anything, it meant that the experience which he had all but demanded of the Methodists was certainly not always his own.

Wesley carried his craving for practical results pretty far into his preaching.

He was not by any means a Jesuit, but he judged virtually every means by the end it attained.

He preached what came to be known as the Methodist experience because he felt such preaching would produce the most decided and positive effects.

He was not a truthseeker as following truth whithersoever it might lead, though he has few superiors for open-mindedness.

If he saw that what he supposed to be the truth was leading him in what he took to be the wrong direction, he did not, indeed, declare false what he had taken to be true: he simply changed direction.

In this same letter to Charles he urged Charles to preach the instantaneous work of grace that he himself might have more time to preach the gradual work.

Here we have the administrator judging his messages almost wholly by their practical efficiency.

This policy was sound enough if Wesley was thinking of the spread of Methodism.

It was no more untrue than for a military general to train a section of his army as his shock troops. Yet it was not truth-seeking in any definition except that of the pragmatic

JOHN WESLEY

philosophy: that truth is what you make out of it in an instrumental use.

Truth is what works, according to this theory. Works howe Wesley's influence was in making the truth work in the practical concerns of life.

Religious truth, however, in some of its higher reaches, may not have any considerable direct bearing on workaday duties.

Something of the same administrative impulse appears in a letter written to Charles from Edinburgh a few months after the one just quoted: "I am at my wits' end regarding Christian perfection.

Shall we go on asserting perfection against all the world: or shall we quietly let it drop?' Wesley is asking whether the Methodists should continue to preach perfection or quietly let the theme drop. 'The reason was that the preaching of perfection was causing schisms and rancor in the societies.

It is curious and interesting to note that this Methodist preaching of perfection has so often made for the manifestations of imperfection among the professors and claimers of the experience. Wesley held fast to the doctrine, which is something of a mystery because, according to the Wesleyan pragmatic principles, the preaching ought to have ceased on account of the dubious results.

Here, however, while admitting the doubtful outcomes, Wesley determined to continue the preaching.

His hard, good sense prevented his making any profession for himself; he saw the divisive results of the doctrine; and yet, after confessing time and again that the fruit of the emphasis was far from satisfactory, he went on insisting upon teaching perfection.

The only explanation of this is that, self-sufficient though he for the most part was, Wesley would not put his own experience over against what seemed to him to be the teaching of the Scriptures, when that teaching was re-enforced by the positive testimony of Christians in whom he had confidence.

Returning once more to the letter to Charles: In spite of the perplexities it arouses, it is a noble testimony.

Here is an unquenchable zeal for the kingdom of God, an unresting desire to be always at the task, a consciousness of being borne along by the divine will.

When he says that he does not fear God, or love God, that only means that there was a dying down of emotional glow. Just what chance there was for such emotional glow in the life of a man working as was Wesley is itself a mystery.

Yet there was glow, the glow of white-hot iron though not of blaze.

Here was the highest and best witness that Wesley could have: the satisfaction in the work itself. He is not carried on by emotional love or

THE SEEKER AFTER PERFECTION

kept back by emotional fear.

His only concern is about falling into nothingness, that is to say, of having the work cease. We have here the best of Calvinism—the conviction that it is God carrying the life along. We have here the best of Arminianism—the constant ratification of the Divine Will by the human choice of Wesley's own free will.

It is to be regretted and deplored that this letter to Charles Wesley was not made public as soon as it was written.

It shows how ideas and their expressions can catch men as truly as can machines which, though the creation of men, sometimes get beyond the control of men.

By his instruction and encouragement Wesley had built up standardized religious expectations for the Methodists, and now found himself, as he thought, falling short of the standard.

The pathos, however, is not here, but in his failure to tell the world —perhaps his failure himself to see—that in the letter to Charles he had expressed a higher experience than anything he had taught his followers.

Here was a witness better than any mystic voice: the witness of life itself pressing irresistibly for outlet in word and deed.

This is the spiritual treasure the Methodists should have seized upon, rather even than Aldersgate, important though that was, though Wesley himself never said as much about Aldersgate as did the Methodists.

Aldersgate lent itself to interpretations Wesley never intended, and helped raise in many a Methodist mind expectations of strange warmings in themselves destined never to be realized.

The doctrine of assured salvation was sometimes so taught by early Methodism as to carry with it a claim of absolute certainty about gaining heaven and avoiding hell that all but robbed belief of any moral worth.

One could conceivably become so sure of the bliss of the saved and the woe of the lost as to choose the righteous path from prudential and not from moral motives.

Ifa kingdom of heaven is to be conceived of as worth while at all, it must be as a realm of venture where the good life is chosen for the sake of the good life itself, and for no other reason.

This letter of John's to Charles is the noblest statement of such choice in Methodist history.

It is the life itself which is bearing Wesley on.

It is the fear of the cessation of the life which is the supreme terror.

In an earlier passage I referred to an overweighting of the scales in some old-time evangelistic appeals, such appeals as: "Here is salvation before you.

You can take it or not, but you will be damned if you don't take it." With so fixed an outcome, especially

JOHN WESLEY

with the outcome phrased in predominantly material figures of speech, there was not room for much moral worth in the choice itself.

'To seek a life, however, because of the life itself, to follow it whithersoever it leads, to ask no heaven better than the life itself, to fear no hell more than the loss of the life—this lifts all up into a genuinely moral realm and appeals to the highest and best in human nature.

If we seek an utterance of experience in which the purely Christian fiber of the life of Wesley shows unmistakably, we come to this letter as the end of the quest.

Moreover, the experience, being so largely of the will, is supreme as a Christian ideal.

Here, then, was a seeker after Christian perfection.

Did he find it? In the form he first sought it, the form of a witness to a complete inner transformation?

No.

In the form of a possibility of self-emptying in Christian activity, and a satisfaction so deep that he ceased to ask whether he was satisfied or not?

All we can say is that we should not know how to go about searching for a closer approach to the ideal.

PART VIII

"WESLEY AND WOMEN"

"The Wesleys are snares to young women.

. All fall in love with them."—James Hutton To Count ZinzenporF, 1740.

PART VIII

"WESLEY AND WOMEN"

E come now to the vexed and vexing question of John Wesley's relation with women.

Early in Wesley's career James Hutton wrote to Zinzendorf that the Wesleys were snares to young women. '"'All fall in love with them." If the question were merely a personal one, there would be no need of doing much more than mentioning it, but it has to do somewhat with his standing and efficiency as a religious leader, and with his general reputation through the centuries.

It is doubtful if Wesley, outside of his mother and sisters, ever knew any strong women in the higher meaning of the word

"strong." The Countess of Huntingdon was of superior endowment and attainments, but there is no indication that she was to any marked degree even a close acquaintance of Wesley's. A sister of one of John Wesley's college mates, with whom he corresponded under Latinized classical names, declared that she loved Wesley more than all mankind, except her God and king; but she finally broke off with him completely.

Again, let us remember that, after he began his evangelistic work, Wesley's opportunities of meeting women at all above the ordinary in endowment or training were not many. The correspondence that passed between him and his women friends indicates that they were persons of sound judgment, mental alertness, and of eagerness to learn; but the extraordinary opportunities which are today within the reach of almost anyone, woman or man, were not available to them.

It would be easy to overstress this, however, for there is nothing to indicate that Wesley cared to have around him what we used to hear called the "educated woman."

All the women in Wesley's Epworth home were extraordinary, with intellects of more than usual ability and of manifest strength of will.

It may be that some of Wesley's difficulties with women arose from his judging them after the pattern of his mother, which would have led only to blunders, for Susanna Wesley was the only one of her kind. Wesley's sisters too were all strong, with traits of distinction which showed itself in the protests of more than one of them against the hardness of their lot at Epworth. The eighteenth

JOHN WESLEY

century offered little enough to young women of the Wesley type.

Samuel Wesley thought only in the conventional terms of getting his daughters suitably married.

John had some correspondence at Oxford with young women: sisters of college friends of his. Each correspondent used a classical pen name, as I have already noted. The letters seem to us of today stilted and lifeless, but that is no proof that they seemed so to the persons who wrote and read them.

'The overtones, the shades of meaning, the suggestions and half-suggestions in letters, are almost impossible to grasp after an interval of two centuries. We find in Wesley's college letters one characteristic true enough to life: his anxiety to improve the spiritual condition of the young woman to whom he wrote.

Of course, under the circumstances, that may have meant anything or nothing at all. Nothing came of the correspondence, not even a continuing friendship.

'There is now some doubt as to the identity of the one who seemed most attractive to Wesley, but the question is of no consequence.

Of the affair with Sophia Hopkey in Georgia we have already spoken.

I have quoted the cynic who said that any man can fall in love with any woman, provided he be near her long enough.

Wesley told his father in 1735 that he went to Georgia to keep away from attractive women.

This gives a little too much importance to spatial propinquity, but such nearness did have something to do with Wesley's affectionate interest in Sophia Hopkey.

She was eighteen; he was in the early thirties.

Certainly, she had never known much of the world before she met Wesley, and, no matter how much she had known of the world in Georgia, which boasted a population of a thousand, she never could have met a man like

Wesley for the sufficient reason that there was no other like him.

Wesley's main concern at the time was the pursuit of spiritual perfection, which was not wholly that of Miss Hopkey, estimable young woman as she no doubt was.

The affair ended awkwardly, as we have already seen, with Miss Hopkey commanding more of our respect than Wesley.

The next love affair was with Grace Murray, widow of a sailor who had been lost at sea.

Mrs. Murray appears to have been a sensible, efficient person, notable for the care of one of the Methodist houses, or homes, or hostelries, which Wesley established. as Methodism came to increasing success.

Probably Wesley admired Grace Murray first for her neatness, and orderliness, and dispatch of business at the Newcastle house. Wesley was death on women

"WESLEY AND WOMEN"

whom he called "sluts."

He avowed that he would not have any "sluts" around any Methodist establishment.

He declared in a letter what today would have brought upon him a court sentence for libel or slander—that one good Methodist sister of whom he was writing was a "consummate slut." Wesley did not mean by this term just what it connotes today, but it does suggest, by contrast, some of the excellence of Grace Murray.

Wesley and Mrs. Murray were thrown together a good deal.

It appears that she traveled with him on some of his tours.

She evidently knew how to get along with him, and is probably entitled to the unique distinction of being the only woman that Wesley ever met who did possess that extraordinary ability.

After a long acquaintance and working together, Wesley told her that he wished to make her his wife. She declared that the honor was too great for her, which is what anyone would have known she would have said under the circumstances, and accepted the proposal. Wesley does not seem to have suspected that there was the slightest difficulty ahead, or likely to be, and went on without any misgiving, expecting, after a tour of the societies which would take him for a time away from Mrs. Murray, to marry her.

There was, however, something in the way.

Mrs. Murray had had an acquaintance with John Bennet, one of Wesley's preachers, which had, it is to be supposed, ripened somewhat beyond the limits of friendship.

Moreover, Charles Wesley was in the way.

For one reason or another Charles did not wish John to marry.

Charles never had a high estimate of John's ability to select intimates. He once made the not overbrotherly remark that John had been created for the benefit of fools and impostors.

Evidently, he thought of himself as the spring of wisdom created to supply all John's lack of wisdom. As soon as Charles heard of the possibility of his brother's marrying Grace Murray, he took to horse, dashed off the miles to where Grace was at the moment, and said something to her which caused her forthwith to marry John Bennet.

What Charles actually said is not known, but he left the impression on Grace Murray that everything was off—that John would not marry her.

The uncertainty is whether Charles acted in good faith.

Whether he did or not is not especially important.

He did not apparently know what he was about.

Yet he may have acted with a sound instinct, though he was dealing in affairs which were not strictly any of his business. The most charitable judgment upon his course is that he was convinced that John could not meet the

JOHN WESLEY

duties of the leadership of Methodism and be married.

Probably he knew too that John would neglect a wife rather than neglect the work—not a happy prospect—though Charles did not act as if he were troubling himself overmuch about Grace Murray.

It has been often alleged that Charles Wesley blocked the marriage of John and Grace because Grace had been a "serving woman." Possibly there is something in this, though, if true, it was not so serious a fault in Charles as we of the present are prone to think.

The English valued social status highly in those days, as they do today.

Methodists of the Charles Wesley type—I mean those who thought strictly in terms of the Church of England, with all that that implied as to the social standing of a priest—feared a loss of social prestige if John married Grace.

Indeed, that would have been the effect if Methodism had had any prestige, or if the Methodists had been hoping to rise in the social scale out of the rank in which Methodism had found them.

It goes altogether without saying that this consideration could not have had a feather's weight with John.

It is worth while to remember, however, that, social rank counting as it did in England and with the Methodists aspiring to rise in the world, Charles Wesley had, what was to many of his contemporaries, a valid point against the marriage of his brother with Mrs. Murray.

Still Charles's getting into this sorry business was not to his credit.

His upset state of mind appears in his remark to John, as he met him on the morning after John

Bennet's marriage to Grace Murray, that he intended to treat John henceforth as a heathen and a publican.

All this was soon set to rights between the two brothers, but it was bad enough while it lasted.

What about the part of Grace Murray? There is no telling, except that remarks like that of T'yerman that she was a jilt—whatever that is—are utterly unjust.

I have said that she knew how to get along with Wesley, but, with Charles at hand talking as he was doing, and with John Bennet at hand also, she solved the problem in one quick stroke.

Looking at the whole situation, she probably knew, or felt, what she was about.

She felt and said that the marriage to Wesley was a happiness of which she did not feel worthy; but that did not necessarily mean much, with another man at hand with whom she had been in love.

Taking the incident as like hundreds of others of the kind, it is probable that she had for Wesley a deep reverence, but that a crisis forced by the meddlesome Charles helped her in an instant to know her true feeling better than she

"WESLEY AND WOMEN"

had ever done before, and to choose accordingly.

We may well guess that the realization that taking John as a husband meant also taking Charles as a brother-in-law meant something to Mrs. Murray.

The victim in all this was John Wesley. He does not seem to have had the least inkling about what was going on till all was over.

He had a right to feel that he had been badly treated throughout.

Mrs. Murray does not seem to have told him enough of her feeling for John Bennet.

Wesley himself was altogether open about any matters he was willing to discuss at all.

It never appears to have entered his head that there was the slightest question about marriage with Mrs. Murray, once the determination had been reached between them.

His account of the experience was set forth in a manuscript, now in the British Museum and repeatedly published—a straightforward putting of the case which commands our respect and admiration quite as much as anything Wesley wrote.

There is thorough genuineness of feeling, no weak sentimentalism, deep disappointment.

As soon as the crisis was over, Wesley considered the case closed and said no more about it. There was a tensely dramatic scene when John and Charles, John Bennet and his new wife met together, with sharp recrimination from Charles, then tears in the eyes of everybody, then as much reconciliation as was possible under the circumstances.

Whitefield was, after a fashion, hanging around on the edge of the crisis; but, inasmuch as he was the suitor who informed his own bride-to-be that he had none of that foolish enthusiasm which the world calls love, it is not likely that he could help much.

What became of Grace Murray?

She kept up her relation to the Methodist societies throughout a life which lasted into the nineteenth century.

It is recorded that in the after years she met Wesley once, in an interview that seems to have been altogether formal and commonplace. Her husband, John Bennet, broke with Wesley in the later period of Wesley's life, which, all things considered, was not surprising.

He might, however, have been a bit more respectful in the remarks which he thereafter made about Wesley.

Mrs. Bennet died in 1803, and her funeral services were in charge of Jabez Bunting.

It is an interesting though futile question to ask if John Wesley's career would have been much different if he had married

Grace Murray.

Possibly the wisest word here has been spoken by

JOHN WESLEY

Doctor Leger in Wesley's Last Love, to the effect that it would have made no particular difference as to the final outcome whom Wesley married, that he was wedded to his work and that he would have acted the same with Mrs. Murray, as his wife, as he did with Mrs.

Vazeille.

Probably Mrs. Murray might have been more submissive than Mrs. Vazeille, but that would likely have been the only difference.

If we keep our consideration of this whole sorry matter down close to what we know of human nature, we may surmise that Grace Murray had all along a half-conscious realization of where

John Wesley's chief interest lay, and of what the future with him would be like, and that the overpowering opposition of Charles

Wesley, which broke off the engagement with John Wesley, may have forced her to a decision in line with innate good sense.

Moreover, she was no doubt aware that Wesley, though deeply grieved, would not be rendered hopeless or paralyzed by her decision. More than one biographer has noted that, after the night of the harrowing meeting of all the parties to the climax, Wesley preached the next morning at the same hour as usual.

We come now to the marriage which did take place—that with Mrs. Vazeille, after a courtship, according to Tyerman, of fifteen or sixteen days.

The best introduction to this is in the famous passage in the Journal which tells us, just after the time of his own marriage, that he called the single young men to remain single for the kingdom of heaven's sake, unless where there might be reason for exception.

This is one of the most bewildering and illuminating utterances which a reader of diaries is likely to come upon in a lifetime.

How any human being, of ordinary good sense, could ever have brought himself to enter that passage in a Journal which he himself intended to be published for the guidance of his followers, is a mystery of the first order.

Yet it is a revelation of John Wesley; of his singular openness; of his complete lack of reticence as to what most men consider strictly their own business; or his innocence of any questioning as to how an entry like the above might affect the party of the second part—if one could call Mrs.

Wesley a party of the second part. One wonders what he thought marriage was anyway.

This consulting with the brethren; this view of marriage as aiding him in his work; this incredible entry about the advice to the young men who were unmarried to remain in the single state—where in all literature can we find anything to match this, under at all similar cricumstances?

Mrs. Wesley had been the wife of a fairly well-to-do business

"WESLEY AND WOMEN"

man, who left her a considerable competency.

Money could not have been in Wesley's mind in contracting the marriage, for it is on record that he never took a penny of his wife's money.

He was a careful handler of money and gave his wife at times good advice as to what to do with her resources, but he would not receive anything of her income for himself: the most he ever did was to borrow small sums to be repaid in a month's time.

The marriage started off well enough, except for an outburst from the officious Charles, who was grievously hurt at John's marrying without consulting him.

It did not seem to occur to Charles that, after the Grace Murray episode, John could be excused from not letting Charles know of his plan until it had been carried out.

Mrs. Wesley evidently sought to adjust herself to her companion's nature and manner of life in good faith and with an earnest purpose.

She traveled with him over England for two years continuously, when travel itself was a stern hardship.

The first breach between the two seems to have opened over the inconveniences of this same traveling. Wesley wrote a passage,

August 31, 1755, which has been often quoted, that to have one complaining about hardships of travel was like tearing the flesh off his bones—the reference being to his wife's querulous faultfinding.

To adopt an old adage, Wesley did not seem to realize that a complaint against a complainer is just as much a complaint as any complaint.

Mrs. Wesley did not like the riding on horseback, and the dirty roads, and the rainy weather, and the poor beds, and the illdressed food at the inns; and Wesley did not like her finding fault about such matters.

In a letter which has recently come to light Wesley said that he had had the itch more than a hundred times— an item of record which may explain Mrs. Wesley's feeling about the hardships of travel.

There is not much ground for supposing that the Wesleys, man and wife, were very companionable with each other. Wesley

'had been drawn to Mrs. Vazeille when he was sick and she was nursing him. He does not seem to have had much acquaintance with her before this experience of being cared for by her. A marriage contracted on the basis of the relation of nurse and sick man is always of doubtful worth.

The situation is too much out of the ordinary. A man like Wesley would show during illness a milder temperament than when he was in normal daily activity. The task of merely keeping up with Wesley, as he moved about at his work, would have been a strain even to a woman of livelier type, or fewer

JOHN WESLEY

years, than Mrs. Wesley.

She had attained to mature age, had grown children of her own, and naturally desired a more fixed abiding place than she saw, after some months of trial, that she was ever likely to get with John Wesley.

He had said that, if marriage ever meant that he had to preach one sermon "less" by being married, he would never marry.

He had always had good words to say about a celibate ministry—words that hinted that, as to marriage, he inclined to the ascetic for asceticism's own sake.

Now, asceticism, to appear lovely at all, must be assumed and undergone by the ascetic's own free will. Not much of spiritual good can come of one's asking another to join in an ascetic course—to say nothing of the positive harm done—when one forces one's self-denials on another.

Mrs. Wesley, however, did try to keep up the Wesley pace till she broke down under it. For a woman well into middle age, accustomed to a more placid order of living, she did wonderfully well.

It is not easy to imagine what they found to talk about together.

Mrs. Wesley, probably to Charles' horror when he heard about it, had, like Grace Murray, been a "serving woman."

No doubt her lifelong interests had been household and domestic.

No word of any kind has come down to us directly from her—which is always to be borne in mind when we are thinking of the Wesley domestic tragedy.

It is not likely that she met Wesley's discourses on religious themes with overpatient understanding.

Grace Murray impresses us as a woman willing to listen to John Wesley, but Mrs.

Wesley does not leave just that impression.

It must be said, though, that, if Wesley ever became bored by the type of conversation which dealt with the range of affairs in which Mrs. Wesley took interest, the feeling of boredom on the other side must have been equally distressing.

Aside from this, it is probable that Wesley liked to be alone on the long trips. He spoke of himself as the loneliest man in England, but that did not mean lonesomeness.

It was on the long trips that he found time for his omnivorous reading and the incalculable output in writing.

Judged by all the standards we can get, Mrs. Wesley was in love with her husband—at least until she at last became insanely jealous. With her outlook on life there was enough to make her jealous. Wesley was a constant letter-writer and many of his letters were to women.

'The letters dealt, for the most part, with religious experience, but such letters tend more than others to become intimate.

Without the deepest sympathy with her hus-

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"WESLEY AND WOMEN"

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band's work, and without the most thorough understanding of his nature, Mrs. Wesley could put constructions on some of the correspondence that passed between her husband and women that made her unhappy. How much she saw of what her husband wrote in such letters, and how the women wrote to Wesley, we do not know; but Mrs. Wesley knew enough to sow the seeds of trouble in plenty.

One of Wesley's complaints—as affairs finally got bad—was that his wife interfered with his mail. She had reason for so doing.

There is no need of dwelling long on the tragedy.

It lasted for years, and differed from other tragedies of the kind only in the peculiarities of the details.

'The judgment of most Wesley biographers puts most of the blame on Mrs. Wesley; but the biographers write so exclusively out of desire to glorify Wesley that they can only with difficulty be fair to Mrs. Wesley.

If she acted in an incredible manner, so also did Wesley.

During the CalvinisticArminian controversy she sought to betray him outright into the hands of his foes. John Hampson, Sr., declared that he once entered Wesley's house without knocking and found Mrs. Wesley standing over her husband, who had evidently fallen or been pushed to the floor, with some locks of Wesley's hair in her fingers.

Some have attempted to discount this story on the ground that Hampson had a grievance against Wesley for being left out of the Legal Hundred when Wesley made the selection.

This attempt at discounting is altogether extreme.

Hampson was not that stamp of man, even though he was disappointed in failing of selection for the Legal Hundred. John Hampson, Jr., was convinced that Wesley had treated his father unfairly but nevertheless wrote a careful and discriminating biography of Wesley.

It must be admitted that Mrs. Wesley's feeling against her husband was fierce enough to make Hampson's testimony all too credible. If her conduct seems beyond belief, however, think of the letter of Wesley to her in which he tells her how obscure she had been when he married her, how she should be content to be obscure and to be ruled by him alone as he was ruled by Christ.

One could pick out two or three letters from Wesley to his wife which, taken by themselves, would be capable of accounting for any extreme of frenzy on Mrs. Wesley's part. Think of writing a jealous wife to be content to be a private, insignificant person, "ruled by her husband as he was ruled by Christ." Rather a high place assumed by the husband, one would think!

Of course the letters cannot be thus taken out of their context, inasmuch as they are in their turn products and results of

JOHN WESLEY

the wife's attitude toward the husband.

It can be said that both sides were to blame; but we must be careful not to weight the scales against the distracted wife.

There was, to look at a single instance, Wesley's interest and regard for Sarah Ryan.

Sarah Ryan was a woman of that peculiar nervous constitution which made her susceptible to religious impressions we now and again call distinctly "spiritual." Her life had been irregular.

She had three husbands living at one time, from no one of whom had she taken steps to become legally free.

From the character of Wesley's references to this woman, it appears that he was more interested in her as open to what he conceived of as divine impressions than in any other wise; but he was guilty of the folly of writing to her about his domestic tragedy. Even though

Sarah Ryan may have been especially responsive to spiritual influences, to say nothing of her being herself an authority on domestic tragedy, she was the last human being to whom Wesley should have written about his troubles with his wife.

Affairs reached a climax, as far as Sarah Ryan was concerned, when at a dinner at London at which possibly twoscore guests were present—Sarah Ryan and Mrs. Wesley among the number—Wesley referred to the gracious influence of Sarah Ryan on his own religious life.

He thought of her, it seemed, as an efficacious channel of divine influence upon himself.

Here is how he had written to Mrs. Ryan in 1758: "The conversing with you, either by writing or speaking, is an unspeakable blessing to me.

I cannot think of you without thinking of God.

. You bring me straight into his presence." To Wesley she was a "'jewel."" After Mrs. Wesley had heard enough of this she arose and pointed out to the dinner party the matrimonial career of Mrs. Ryan.

It is to be admitted that Mrs. Wesley committed all manner of dreadful wrongs against her husband, for which the most intelligible explanation is that she was at least half-crazy.

She told about Wesley falsehoods of the most preposterous order; she broke open letters that he had written, and interpolated in them remarks calculated to make him direst trouble.

The justification for giving so much space to this matter, here and in other books about Wesley, is that, inasmuch as Wesley's followers have claimed for him a Christian experience which made his life flawless, it is well, if we are interested in experience which is to be a lesson to others, to keep close to facts in thinking of Wesley. There is here too the question as to whether the extraordinary

"WESLEY AND WOMEN"

ano religious life, which Wesley's was, can be fitted into the ordinary routine, or whether the ability of such a life to get along in some natural human contacts does not of itself call for extraordinary spiritual resources.

Wesley remarked in his closing years that perhaps God had overruled this terrible experience for good, because he might not have achieved so much if he had been happy at home.

Mrs. Wesley might have turned this the other end around and have replied that she could have been happy if her husband had not tried to achieve so much.

Tyerman wrote as if to pass judgment on the whole wretched business: "Wesley was a dupe; Grace Murray a flirt; John Bennet a cheat, Charles Wesley officious."" There is slight warrant for any of this judgment except that about Charles Wesley.

Interest in Wesley's love affairs—the entire sweep of them— has been for the moment revived by a book entitled Son to Susanna, by Mrs. G. Elsie Harrison, daughter of the John S. Simon who was the best authority on Wesley who has yet appeared.

Mrs. Harrison has read much in modern psychology, has had as close access to the facts as anyone, possesses an imagination for which "vivid" would be a mild term.

In interpreting the events of one hundred and fifty to two hundred years Mrs. Harrison needs but the bare statement of the fact.

She can put a body upon a mere skeleton of fact with incredible speed, but she creates the body. For example, she finds the clue to about everything John Wesley did in a "curtain of fire" his mother threw around him dating from the date of the plucking of the brand from the burning.

In the opening of Son to Susanna the fire might have been started by Samuel's roaming around with a torch in his hand—after there had been brewing through the day—with his mind filled with the victories of Marlborough.

On the next page but one after that Samuel did set the house afire—and Susanna despised him for it. Mrs. Harrison's imagination is not deep but fast.

Again, when Samuel appeared on the scene after the alarm of fire, he had his "pantaloons" in his hands, probably because he wanted to put them on. A house on fire, however, is not the best place to put on ''pantaloons." A little later Mrs. Harrison has Samuel waving the "pantaloons" over his head, to the scorn of Susanna, who detested the "old man''—aged forty-two. Just how the fire-curtain, even after such a start as this, determines all John Wesley's love affairs, the reader may decide for himself.

Another instance: Grace Murray was the widow of Alexander

JOHN WESLEY

Murray, a sea captain drowned at sea.

There appears to have been some disagreement between Grace and Alexander because of Grace's increasing interest in Methodism. Alexander was lost overboard on his next voyage—'"'for," asks Mrs. Harrison, "why should he return?"

Mrs. Harrison, in her patient search for facts as starting grounds for her imagination, might have done well to steady herself with a little examination of the traditions of British salts, especially of sea captains who, no matter what else is sacred, keep the devotion to their ships in the first place.

Alexander was lost overboard—that we know. That he willingly allowed himself to be washed overboard is a supposition which shows what an imagination can do when it is working with ample sea-room.

Wrestling Jacob, by Marjorie Bowen, is another psychological interpretation of Wesley's life.

There is a deal of insight in the book and a cool, rational temper, together with no small amount of skepticism.

It is a helpful handling of the life of one who with all his faith—and credulity—was himself much more of a rationalistic and skeptic than some of us have been willing to allow.

PART IX

SPREADING SOCIAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

PART IX Pa,

SPREADING SOCIAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

'i are two shades of opinion today as to Wesley's social achievements.

On the one hand are those who will have it that Wesley was not interested in what we call the social results of Wesleyanism; and on the other, are those who tell us that the broad human outcome of his work was what concerned him; that he was so interested in this that, if he were living today, he would utilize even the agnostic, perhaps the atheistic notions of our time, using them as he did the theological conceptions of his day as instruments for bettering human life.

One interesting biography of Wesley has been written from this latter assumption.

Wesley was chiefly concerned with a personal, individualistic message and practices. There is no need of our trying to prove anything else. He would help by giving men jobsif he could. In 1787,

"he took a view (presumably admiring) of Mr. Ryle's silk mill, which keeps two hundred children in perpetual employment." He was not primarily dealing with social agencies.

'The study of his career as a social force reveals both the strength and weakness of such a purpose, and shows how the social atmosphere was a cause and effect of many of the most important phases of the movement.

The geographers tell us that England owes her geographical importance in large part to the Gulf Stream, which, starting from West Indian waters, carries warmth from the tropics to the British

Isles, the tides lapping around the Isles on all sides. A shift in the Stream would utterly transform the range and quality of life in England.

In the eighteenth century a new stream of life began to _ play upon England, and by spiritually climatic processes transformed the life there.

Some of these forces came to sweeping expression.

The effects of the Revolution, especially in its antifeudalistic phase of 1688, were beginning to make themselves decisively felt by the time of Wesley's birth. During the eighty-eight years of his life there came the American Revolution, the French

Revolution, the Industrial Revolution.

The result was the release of new forces, some of them through the creation of new physical tools, some through new governmental procedures, some through

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new social customs, some through new ways of looking at the world.

Out of the material, ponderable facts came imponderables—spiritual currents and atmospheres which actually swept around the world. Probably few if any of the seers of the century knew what was going on around them, but the whole world was on the march nevertheless.

It was in such world in transition that John Wesley played his part. The part has of late probably been overestimated, but it was important enough to demand the attention of historians as long as history is studied.

The truth seems to be that the work of Wesley came to its mature power just at about the dawn of modern capitalism, if we may accept without holding too seriously the judgment of the Webbs that capitalism is about a century and a half old.

There have always been the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, but modern capitalism means everything industrial on the large scale—large accumulations of money, large aggregations of men, large tools worked by those who do not own them, large, indeed, world-wide markets.

If we wish to set a beginning for this type of capitalism, we may say that it coincides with the independence of Methodism, conceded by Wesley's deed of declaration in 1784.

I do not mean that Wesley at all detected or appreciated the lineaments of the capitalism coming on the stage just as he was going off Those who read through this book, however, will see that it does hold that Wesley kept two values—that of men and that of money, or material things—in such relation to one another that he influenced markedly the capitalistic movement which he never saw nor foresaw.

Just as a single item we note that in 1790 there were twice as many country laborers in England as town; fifty years later there were twice as many town laborers as country.

When Wesley died, therefore, his teaching was to get a setting the like of which he had himself not seen.

One element in the strength of Wesleyanism as a social power lay in that it took any account at all of what we call the masses.

It does not make much difference whether or no Wesley deliberately turned to what we call the plain people because the higher classes would not hear him. He did turn to them virtually from the first, and that he did so had a social significance. He could not carry on his spreading method without attempt to reach the largest numbers, and in doing so he inevitably "spread"' his truth into the large social relationship, even if he did not intend to do so.

It is not necessary to paint the eighteenth century in total

SPREADING SOCIAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

20g blackness to enforce the social significance of Wesley's ministry.

We have only to look at the people to whom he spoke. Could there be any surer sign of Wesley's belief in the inherent responsiveness of men to goodness than his willingness to preach to crowds in the open air? One of the mysteries to us of today is why the mobs rose against Wesley's attempt to bring to them the gospel.

We shall have occasion to note later that there were attempts to make Wesley out a papist, and thus to arouse patriotic feeling against him, but this was an afterthought.

Probably we have to take the mob excesses as owing in part to the fact that the magistrates could not enforce the laws outside the cities because there was virtually no police. The brutality of the crowds in their treatment of the Wesleyan preachers would have been enough to tell us what the century was like, even if we did not know of the cockfighting and the bullbaiting and the bearbaiting.

As far as possible the leaders of the nation ignored the masses.

The franchise was limited; the ordinary man had little chance.

We need only glance at what we should call the lower courts of law to see that the boasted English justice, so far as the masses were concerned, amounted to little or nothing.

How many times, at least in the early days, was Wesley refused even the elementary rights which today would be supposed to belong to the humblest citizen!

In this insistence upon preaching to the crowds, Wesley fulfilled the essential requirements of the later nineteenth-century liberalism—free speech, free assembly, and elementary human rights. Of course the list of these primary rights became broader in the course of a century, but Wesley stood in the path that led to the enlargement.

If Wesley had not done anything else than to stand upon his right to speak, he would have rendered England notable service.

He has to be reckoned among the champions of free speech—one of his best contributions to his time and to all time.

In insisting upon this right he acted in legal fashion.

'There is little evidence to show that in their mob-threatened and mobattacked meetings the Methodists struck back—physically, that is.

There were not among them in England any who could outmob mobs and outbully bullies by fist power. Wesley depended upon seeking to get redress against mobs from the law, though it does not appear that he ever got what we should call police protection.

There might have been an occasional stalwart, a leader of a mob, overcome by Wesley's calmness and persuasiveness; and once in a while even a woman of Amazon proportions, who literally struck

JOHN WESLEY

out in Wesley's behalf, but Wesley did not countenance use of force.

To get back to the point from which we started: the assumption in Wesley's appeals to the crowds. A crowd, even in a bullying temper, is quite proud of itself because of the sheer weight of its numbers.

Wesley had the high strategy of ability to break the crowd up into units by appealing directly to the conscience of the individuals that composed it. We.have heard about the crowd contagion of Wesley's meetings, and we have to recognize the place and power of such contagion, as, indeed, Wesley himself did, but we must not miss Wesley's ability to speak so directly to hundreds of men as to make each individual feel that the soul-searching words were aimed directly at himself alone.

In spite of all the rage which Wesley had to face, it did not take forever for the ordinary people to see that here was a leader of men, of fine appearance, of evident knowledge and wisdom,

cared for them as if they were of inherent worth.

Nobody could go to one of Wesley's meetings and leave, if he listened at all, without gaining the impression that the least and wickedest in the crowd had a soul worth saving. Men always ask, when a religious leader appears, what the leader is getting out of it himself. There was nothing that the crowd could see that Wesley was getting out of his work itself except the consciousness of doing all possible for his fellow men.

Wesley met the masses to whom he spoke on the level.

He certainly did not look up to the crowds as if they were at all his superior, even in physical might; he as certainly did not look down upon them with any trace of superiority.

He never threatened, he never cajoled, he never flattered.

He could make men thoroughly ashamed of themselves and yet not leave them in any groveling self-contempt.

It was no slight social service, no small contribution to the forces which would one day create the public opinion of England, to have Wesley going up and down the land for sixty years on the assumption that the people to whom he spoke were worthy of the best he could give them.

The connection between Wesley's thought of God and his attitude toward men was immediate and complete.

He sought to view men from the divine revelation.

Let it not be supposed, however, that we are to picture Wesley as traveling through life with his eyes fixed on the stars, occasionally glancing at men with regard for them because of the divine love for them.

He valued men as Jesus did—on their own account.

It is not possible to get

SPREADING SOCIAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

any impression from reading hundreds upon hundreds of pages of Wesley other than that of interest in and care for men because of themselves.

This is, indeed, just another way of stating that he saw in them the souls for whom the Lord Christ died, but he saw them as Christ did. He treated them with supreme regard to their personal worth and dignity.

Again, an important social influence in Wesley's attitude toward men was his making his societies agencies which recognized and made use of the excellences of men, of any men who showed the excellences.

Here was an organization built up of men just as Wesley found them—all sorts and conditions of men.

There had to be leadership among the societies.

Wesley used any talent for such leadership that he could find, wherever he could find it.

In its way the Methodist society in a community opened a door upward into a service, which, no matter how apparently insignificant it might be, was a door open to a position which gave importance to the man who held it. This may not seem to be worth much attention, but anyone who has had to deal with the problem of leadership in a church will know what I mean.

It is common in religious circles to hail the merger of smaller into larger church groups as wise economy, and so it is in these days of costly expenditures in ecclesiastical enterprises.

But it is not always so when we are dealing with the development of religious leadership. 'The small Methodist societies all over England were instruments and fields for the development of leaders.

Even a class leader, entrusted with the financial and spiritual guidance of a group of not more than a dozen persons, was a figure of consequence in the Methodist community.

The Methodist societies were training grounds in a leadership which might, without Methodism, have been totally lost, or never realized or heard of. The leaders trained among the Methodists could use their powers and skills in wider fields than the specifically religious. When lay preaching became customary, the training in public speech of scores of Methodists became a social service of incalculable worth.

Wearmouth has recently shown us in Methodism and the Working Class Movements of England the force which such Methodist training revealed in the industrial activities, especially trade-unions, in the first half of the nineteenth century in England.

Years ago, just after Lenin arose to such power in Russia, I came upon a Communist—then called Bolshevist—at work in China.

I asked how he could hope, under the obstacles which confronted

JOHN WESLEY

him, to make headway toward converting any considerable mass of Chinese.

His reply was that he was giving himself only to the preliminaries, of teaching the Chinese how they could work together in discussion groups, and put motions, and take actions in a parliamentary fashion.

When they had learned how to do this, he said, it would be time enough to put content into the actions.

The laymen of Methodism, likewise, soon learned some of the secrets of control of one's fellow men by speech and by organized group activity.

This should be kept in mind, when we think, as we must, of the dictatorial rule of John Wesley over his societies.

Wesley was by talent and choice and training a despot.

No matter how complete his impulse toward despotism, however, it was practically limited.

Fifty miles a day was fast traveling for Wesley, though he occasionally, as in 1759, rode ninety miles in one day. The intervals between the visits to a particular society had to be long, and in those intervals the Methodists had to handle their affairs as best they could, even though when Wesley came a second time he remarked to the members of one society "in plain terms that they were the most ignorant, self-conceited, self-willed, fickle, intractable, disorderly, disjointed society that I know in the three kingdoms."

Wesley might rebuke his lieutenants, but he usually had to let stay done what they had done.

He told one of his preachers that he talked too long and another that he talked too loud. We speak of his close supervision of the societies—and it was close when he was at hand, but he was not often at hand. A despot is not so terrible where are not railroads, or telegraphs, or telephones, or fast mails, or newspapers, or the radio.

Wesley's followers had to do what he said, but he could not say much about all detailed situations.

By the time the followers found out what he had said, the urgency, or crisis, of a threatening situation had passed.

It will be recalled that Wesley wrote sharply to the American Methodists about their taking things in their own hands.

While the Americans wrote back with renewed avowals of esteem for their spiritual father, they went on doing what seemed best to them.

So it was in lesser degree all over England.

It may seem like forcing a point to speak of the Methodist meetings as training grounds for leadership.

The Methodists, however, took all these opportunities seriously.

Life did not then have the distractions that it has now.

In many a community after dark there was no place to which to go but to the Methodist meeting

SPREADING SOCIAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

Za0 place.

Except the day's work, which was terribly heavy, the experiences at that meeting place were the most absorbing in the life of the Methodists.

The captain of one of the world's mightiest ocean steamships some time ago declared that, in his judgment, the best training for a youth who might aspire to rise to a position like his own is on the old-fashioned sailing ship.

At first this seemed like a halfsentimental praise of a phase of sea life now almost wholly gone.

Not so, however, after the seaman gave his reasons.

On the oldfashioned ship, it appears, the sailor does not, indeed, learn the mechanism of the modern steamer, which is a triumph of scientific genius.

One knowledge he does acquire, however—knowledge of the sea. He is down close to it. There is so little of distraction on the deck of the sailing ship that the sailor has nothing to look at except the sea.

As the popular song has it, when he goes to sea, he sees the sea. A wave looks different when it washes across a deck from the way it appears when it breaks harmlessly against the steel sides of a liner, yet the skillful handling of the liner depends upon intimate knowledge of how waves and tides and currents act. Similarly, the intimate knowledge of human nature, as it acts ordinarily and in crisis, was learned by the leaders of the units of Methodism until many of them became veritable experts.

'The expertness was gained down close to the waves of elementary human experience, where, without much chance at the artificialities of life, men had to act about as they were.

There have been critics of Wesley who have at least implied that he gave himself to the humbler classes because they would make the most devoted followers; that those who had had no chances at advantages of birth and training felt honored, not to say flattered, at the attentions paid them by a son of the Established Church who had become a Fellow of Oxford. If this is urged to support the con_ tention of a Southey, already referred to, that Wesley was a human being actuated by the human quality of personal ambition, it is not worth long consideration.

Ifa man is acted on by personal ambition, in its selfish forms, he is not likely to drive along under such a power for over sixty years. When we speak of ambition, we think of that inner realm where the inner cannot be seized by direct inspection but only by outer effects.

Making allowance for all the alloy in human nature, we are not So blind to the limitations of selfish ambition as to fancy that such ambition can force a leader

JOHN WESLEY

up and down the England of the eighteenth century through nearly three quarters of that century.

All this is entirely compatible with the belief that Wesley did see and did take account of the fact that he knew that he could do more with the humbler than with the higher classes.

The higher classes—using higher here in the accepted meaning—would not have listened to Wesley and would not have heeded him if they had listened.

So he went elsewhere.

Here let us remark that Wesley committed that offense which members of privileged classes so often find unpardonable—he would not remain true to the attitudes and expectations of his own class.

It would not be fair to say that Wesley to any degree betrayed the class into which he had been born, but he certainly would not conform to it. He was himself a High Churchman and a Tory, by his own avowal, but he certainly spoke his whole mind on HighChurchmen and Tories.

It must have been manifest from the outset that the Methodist Movement would not have more than the slightest effect in the narrower "social" sense.

It would not open the doors to the ranks of nobility or bring titles of social distinction.

It is conceivable that, if Wesley were now on earth in this year of our Lord 1939, completing sixty years of such service as he rendered in the eighteenth century, he might receive some token of honor from the English court.

He might even be granted a seat in the House of Lords, though that requires a strain on the imagination.

It would be a strain too on the loyalty of a world-wide Methodism.

Any social honor of this kind for a leader of Methodism in Wesley's day would have been unthinkable.

I have just said that Wesley rendered a service by opening a door upward for the larger usefulness of men who might become leaders in Methodist circles.

I now say that he did everything he could to develop among those groups from whom the Methodists came a proper class consciousness, at least a legitimate pride in their own circles.

To Wesley salvation was social.

Making salvation social, however, meant the development of a minority group of deeply intense cohesiveness which had large social possibilities and results.

It is worth noting that social students today hold that the line of progress is in the direction of recognizing the importance of such groups.

SPREADING SOCIAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

This class consciousness did have at times a tendency toward developing spiritual pride. A man as conscious of his own salvation as were some of the early Methodists can be a good deal of a nuisance.

Indeed, a measure of the disfavor of the early Methodists came from this source. Nevertheless, it was socially important that the class of people to whom Methodism came attain to a proper self-respect.

'There was no chance of their getting into the socalled higher classes.

All the more reason, therefore, why they should develop the spirit of their own class. Wesley was an admirable social force in this regard, for he knew what was in the socalled higher society, especially how little was there when it came to genuine moral and human value.

He knew how to beget in his followers a satisfaction with their own fellows without any subserviency toward those who are called the more privileged.

Wesley knew, however, just how powerful was this social prestige, or feeling of superiority, or whatever we choose to call it.

He feared the shadow of respectability.

He knew that nothing likely to happen in his own lifetime would break the self-defenses of social prestige, and he did not think it worth his while to try.

This is the last fortress of privilege to be broken anyhow. You can take away from a class all political and financial control and leave it the power of decreeing social standing and you have left in its hand a surpassing resource, human nature being what it is. The genuine remedy is the development of high ideals of human worth within the so-called less-privileged classes.

Methodism did not arise even among the so-called middle classes of England.

It began farther down than that.

In nothing is what we call the statesmanship of Wesley more manifest than in his acceptance of the limitations which sent him to work among the lowly.

If one is to start a fire of new interest in religion, it is well to apply the torch at the bottom of the social heap.

I stay on this point probably to the weariness of my readers.

It is charged, too often with justice, that when a leader of conspicuous ability arises among the less-favored groups, the more favored to a degree make him one of themselves, for their own purposes.

If the favored realm is that of material wealth, the accusation is that, as soon as a mind of high technical promise appears, or even of evident leadership among the laboring class, the favored "higherups" immediately proceed to "pick his brains" for the advantage of themselves.

This can be done in many ways—by financial rewards, by social attention, by any one of a score of subtle flatteries.

JOHN WESLEY

In this connection we may be pardoned for pointing again to the contrast between Wesley and Whitefield.

"The Countess of Huntingdon acted in all good faith in creating opportunities for Whitefield to preach before members of her social circle. Her own experience of conversion had evidently been deep and genuine.

Still, we cannot see much evidence that in his preaching to the Countess of Huntingdon's guests Whitefield got far.

"They were astonished, indeed, at his oratorical ability, but that was about all.

It is esteemed an honor to Whitefield that Lord Chesterfield was impressed by his gifts of speech and commented that he talked ably on the "divine attributes.'"' As Sam Weller would say, "This is rayther rich." But it would be hard to find the faintest trace of moral or spiritual effect of Whitefield on Chesterfield.

Whitefield rejoiced in the "tip-top nobility" that he met at the home of the Countess, which is somewhat of a self-revealing utterance.

There is more moral worth in Wesley's contemptuous references to Chesterfield than in any oratorical spells that the magic eloquence of Whitefield wove around the cynical lord.

It is charged against Wesley that, in his preaching to the less favored, he dwelt on an other-worldliness which made them acquiescent in the evils of this present world.

If this means that he did not preach revolt, it is true; but it is not true if it means that he preached submission to ills which could be remedied.

Everywhere he went he gave his attentions to the conditions under which men actually lived.

There are those who are fond—perhaps overfond—of quoting from Lecky that, if it had not been for John Wesley, scenes like the wholesale guillotine slaughters of the French Revolution might have been common in England; that Wesley forestalled a revolution like that of France from reaching the shores of England. This striking tribute to the significance of Wesley is sound enough rhetorically, but it requires qualification.

It is more an outburst than an insight.

Some interpret Lecky's word as meaning that Wesley so gave himself to the inner life of men that he made men too good to rebel at evil institutions; and they claim him for ¢onservatism, while others condemn him for a conservatism that prevented in England changes like those brought to France by the Revolution.

All agree on the conservatism.

There is no doubt about the conservatism, as far as Wesley's intent and temper were concerned.

Nevertheless, Wesley worked deliberately to make better the physical condition of the people.

SPREADING SOCIAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

Zio We have seen his interest in their physical state, as shown in his own remark that, outside the studies which bore directly on his evangelistic tasks, he gave most of his time to the investigation of human diseases and their cure.

We know what he did with the royalties which came from the sale of Primitive Physic. We know too his interest in education and in the spread of cheaply printed books throughout England.

Now, the path to successful social change does not altogether lie in the notion that at last, after unspeakable woes, the people will rise against their woes; that the worm will at last turn; that the worse social conditions become, the closer we are to revolution.

The truer philosophy is in the other adage, so often used as complaint against reformers who seek for advantages for their fellow men: Give unprivileged groups an inch and they will take an ell.

There is an oppression that succeeds, succeeds in stamping out all initiative and all hope. Conditions can be so bad that there is no chance. Wesley did not find anything of this desperate nature. He found enough moral and spiritual responsiveness to call forth all his energies in optimistic effort.

Without any sympathy for the social revolutionary doctrines current in his time, especially in his later years, he nevertheless put in the hands of his followers the instruments which would in the end bring about changes which, if he could have foreseen them, he would have regarded with horror.

That is, if he could have seen only part and not all.

There was nothing though in what he taught or did which would lead to any swift uprising.

Those who praise Wesley and those who blame him for standing in the way of movement toward anything like a French Revolution, moreover, forget that there is not any one simple pattern of revolution which can be applied to all peoples alike. The ideas released by any revolution do indeed spread pretty well through the earth, but they do not make revolutions everywhere.

Lenin, _in our own day, certainly knew something about setting a revolution going, and he has told us, speaking with authority, that a revolution to succeed in a given social situation must be exactly fitted to that condition, called forth by particular needs, adjusted to the mood and temper of the particular people, supplied with instruments native to and usable by the particular people.

If the revofutionary ideas spread from one land to another, they must in that other land take on forms which express the mind and mood of that land.

This, of course, before they become popularly effective in

JOHN WESLEY

that land.

I am not speaking of the little knots of sympathizers in every land with any and all revolutions in every other land.

Even if Wesley had given himself to preaching the doctrines like those of the French Revolution, it is doubtful if he could have started a revolution in England like that which near the close of his life came in France.

Nobody has ever surpassed Walter Bagehot in the understanding of the English mind and temper.

Bagehot long, long ago pointed out that there is a type of logic which appeals to and manifests itself in the French mind in utter contrast to anything on the English side of the Channel, a logic which seizes an idea quickly, gives it a speed of movement which travels from Paris out to the remotest frontiers as swiftly as the fastest vehicles can carry it and pushes it at once to extreme action

—to racing to the full length. If it be replied to this that the French are much steadier now than they were in the middle of the nineteenth century when Bagehot wrote, we must remember that Bagehot was nearly a century closer to the French Revolution than we are today, and it is conditions then of which we speak.

On the other hand, Bagehot laid stress on the socially conservative side of the English character as expressed, not in stupidity, indeed, but in slowness of mental movement.

It was in this connection that he, an Englishman, told of that oft-quoted interview which he had with an English farmer at the time of the Crimean War.

The farmer was sure that England and her allies could never win, because they could never catch "he Czar." No amount of explanation availed to make the farmer see that it was not necessary, in order to defeat Russia, to catch "'he Czar." Bagehot declared that this stolidity of the farmers of England made for social stability.

The French peasant can be just as stolid as anything in England, however, but Bagehot might have replied that this also proved his point as to social steadiness, though what he was trying to say was that the French mind, of his day at least, moved faster and went further than the English.

In any case, the revolutionary violence of the French did not fit into the English scheme of things.

The English were brutal enough, and they suffered abuses, but as a mass they did not readily take fire.

'Their outbreaks were sporadic.

The Church depended, for example, in large part upon the tithe system, which the farmers of Wesley's day accepted as in the regular order. When Samuel Wesley found one of the farmers from whom he received rents making away with some of the tithe crops due him

—Wesley—he was about as shocked as he was over the attempts of

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the Epworth villagers to burn the Rectory, and at least thought that he had terribly humiliated the thief by exposing him to the neighbors.

The ordinary dweller in England too had to suffer from grievous laws.

The press gang seized John Nelson, one of Wesley's best lay preachers, chiefly because he was a Methodist.

Still, the feeling of grievance was not so deep or keen in England as in France. 'The Established Church in England was not to be mentioned in the same day with the Church in France, when it came to oppressiveness.

The excoriations of Voltaire, if directed against the Established Church in England, would have had some point, but not much.

The worst that could have been said against the English Church was that it was remiss as a servant of the people.

Likewise with the nobility. The charge against them could have been social uselessness, but not cruelty. Both Church and nobility were socially expensive, but they did not then have to meet the question as to who paid for them.

Indeed, that. particular question has never been raised in England with any insistence at all searching, not to say desperate.

John Wesley no doubt did something to make an England proof against a revolution like that of France; but if he did, he did not deserve any noteworthy credit.

What finally prevented any considerable sympathy in England toward French Revolutionaries were the gains already won in the Revolution of 1688, which struck the mortal blow at Feudalism and the excesses of the Revolution itself. I have referred to Bagehot's opinion of the logic of the social thinking of the French.

It was just a step beyond French logicalness, so to speak, to social lunacy.

The career of Robespierre, to take the conspicuous instance, is that of a leader of clear vision, of complete sincerity, who in his devotion to the abstract gets clean away from the concrete.

What abstract logic called for abstract logic must have, under Robespierre's leadership, even if that meant heads in the baskets at the foot of the guillotines.

Moreover, could even a Robespierre have persuaded the English to behead George III?—scant as was George III's popularity.

There have been three leaders of world-wide importance in the past two centuries, who have believed in human perfectibility.

One was Karl Marx, who felt that the evils in man's nature were due to a bad environment, and that, if society could get the bad out of the environment, it would at the same time get the bad out of human nature.

A second was Robespierre, who, though he

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came to power after the life of Wesley had ended, was training himself for leadership while Wesley was still preaching in England.

Robespierre believed with all his soul that absolute devotion to the ideal was all that was necessary to introduce a virtually perfect society—perfection to be achieved by putting evildoers out of the way.

Facts, realities of the actual order, counted with him not at all. The ironic outcome has been that the man who in modern history was totally devoted to an ideal of a perfect social creation has thus far been regarded as one of the blackest villains in the annals of time.

Certainly, his deeds objectively considered were black enough.

Now, John Wesley taught perfection, not clearly, not consistently, but definitely, nevertheless—the perfectibility of the individual life. He was as much devoted to the ideal of helping men on perfection as any idealist who ever lived. He was as uncompromising in principle as any one-ideaed doctrinaire, but he put in his whole life trying to adjust his ideals to actual circumstances, and making circumstances over, as far as it could be done, to bring about an earthly setting for the ideal.

It is only just to say that many of the propositions for social betterment in Wesley's time virtually lay outside the sphere of his thinking. We live in a day when the social opportunities of the Church are urged upon the Church in scores of ways.

It was not quite so two centuries ago, at least the social obligations were not so definitely preached. No one could have spoken more definitely about matters like the Just Price, for example, than did Richard

Baxter, a century before Wesley, but Baxter was an exception, a pathbreaker, and was urging upon individual Christians their duties as individuals.

Moreover, it is lamentably true that social evils are not always. as apparent to men actually facing them as to those looking back upon them a century or two later. ""How could have human beings put up with such conditions?" we ask in horrified tones, as we glance back after a century or even a half-century.

How indeed? The students of the twenty-first century will ask the same question about us, and in the same shocked accents.

A foremost leader of our Civil War was once asked why his army had not better followed up a particular victory. He replied that, after three days of terrible struggle, nobody thought of following up anything. The illustration is inadequate, but it does hint at the shortness of view of those in an actual struggle.

Life is under such stress that to get through one crisis and on to the next is the sole idea

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of many a worthy leader. Wesley's life was passed under such stress.

In addition, his primary interests were not social except indirectly.

Much of the criticism against him was of the order that blames men for not hitting targets at which they do not aim.

The first thing that Wesley used to notice about the Methodists as he traveled up and down the land was the conditions in which they lived—their material resources.

'Those who tell us that Methodism suffered from the otherworldliness that helped them to put up with hardships here for the sake of happiness hereafter ought to give a little heed to the efforts of Wesley to improve the lot of his followers here and now.

He held to the hereafter, not as something to be dreamed about, but as something to be worked for by the right use of material goods here. He conceived of men as stewards of wealth—and stewards are not to be idle.

In his volumes of standard sermons there was no sermon on hell or heaven.

So we have that famous sermon on the use of money—with the oft-quoted advice: "Gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can." There has seldom been any such utterance worse handled.

Gain all you can has been taken to mean by any way you can, whereas, if one were to read Wesley's limitations on methods of getting, one would find an outline of business ethics to which the world has not yet attained.

In the section: "Gain all you can," there are eight divisions: (1) We are not to seek to gain at the expense of our bodies, (2) of our minds, of our souls. We are not to gain (3) by hurting our neighbor in his substance, (4) or in his body, (5) even as physicians delay to cure illness for prolonged gain, (6) or in the neighbor's soul. We are to get (7) by honesty in every form of work, (8) by progressively making the best of all that comes to our hands, constantly learning to do better work.

The other main divisions have likewise many subdivisions.

Saving does not mean hoarding, but the avoidance of waste. Much of Wesley's oft-discussed asceticism was due, not toa Romish desire to "mortify the flesh" but to avoid useless expenditure.

The legitimate desire to make the most of one's appearance in dress meant nothing to Wesley, hence his denunciation even of ribbons as waste, although actually Wesley was scrupulously careful in his own dress.

One cannot resist the feeling that Wesley was as anxious about the impression his appearance was making as any leader of histime.

This, however, is aside from the point.

Saving, in Wesley's meaning, was absence from expenditure for display.

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All of which, of course, revealed a lack in the Wesley understanding of human nature.

Most of us live our lives in the gaze of our fellows, and do not feel that there is anything wasteful in producing as pleasant an impression as may be upon the mind of our fellows.

Here, again, Wesley did not have the teachings of our psychology as to the inevitability and legitimacy of many normal human impulses. Wesley himself did not do so badly as to impressive appearance "'with his cassock, his black silk stockings, his large silver buckles."

To Wesley, wasteful expenditure was a sin, as, indeed, we think today, the difference between our day and his being as to what expenditure is wasteful.

By saving, Wesley did not mean hoarding.

We come next to the most important injunction of all: "Give all you can." By this Wesley meant give practically all. The only reservations were that the care of dependents was not to be neglected, and that money for the actual carrying on of a business could be held in one's hands for that purpose.

This was, indeed, a counsel of perfection.

It is particularly notable that in the days when Methodism made so much of Christian perfection there were not more who saw that Wesley's doctrine of giving all was, for the time, a major feature of that doctrine. The chief test of Methodist regard for the neighbor had to be the use of money, mostly for the relief of distress.

Wesley was consistent in teaching that, if a man was to be perfect, he must bring all his money under the ideal of perfection—as indeed he must at any time.

'The one path to perfect service of the neighbor that Wesley could see was in the actual relief of poverty by giving.

Extensive emphasis on legislative and social measures came after he had gone.

At least the one duty which lay most out in Wesley's full view was that of the giving of one's substance, for the relief of men.

Wesley had hardly got well into action—this was in 1740—when he set collections going among the Methodists, which fed each day about one hundred and fifty who were out of work.

The Wesley contribution here is in bringing "all" under Christian principle.

There has always been a tendency in the 'Church to compromise on this problem of the Christian use of money. Compromise is indeed inevitable, and that without necessarily involving moral fault in the compromiser, for the field is not always definitely marked out, and in many cases there is no moral guidance in the facts themselves.

The result is that, with a loosening of the determination to bring "all" under the law of perfec-

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tion, inner strictness begins to relax.

The outcome is the double standard, or a division of loyalties between the religious life and the pursuit of gain. Religion becomes religion and business business.

The only safety is the tight grasp on the ideal of the whole activity as subject to Christian purpose whether one can see clearly what to do with a specific problem or not.

It cannot be claimed that Methodists ever followed Wesley's injunction about giving all. It can be maintained that he himself was as nearly perfect in consistency here as any mortal could well be.

He earned before his death large returns from his books. He gave away altogether about thirty thousand pounds. He did not spend anything upon himself beyond what most of us would call the bare necessities.

He did leave an annuity for Sally, the daughter of his brother Charles, but that was all. When the grave closed over him and the "poor men" who carried him to that grave had been paid the pound apiece that he had ordered, and his library had been set aside for his preachers, that was the end so far as his own personal wealth was concerned.

Wesley's thought of the redemption of society by economic means was conceived in terms of the individual's use of money to help his fellow men, either by direct gift or preferably by giving them work.

In 1740 he found a way to get places for twelve of his followers, carding and spinning cotton.

Still, Wesley could not travel five thousand miles a year throughout England without seeing the play of causes of distress which were not due to the activities of individuals taken separately.

At least some evils were owing to the fact that "everyone was doing it." Wesley's suggestions as to what would remedy bad economic conditions were not worked out with any scientific thoroughness by himself or by anyone else, for that matter, so that we have to regard Wesley's utterances, therefore, as lay observations of a traveler of keen vision but of no extensive familiarity with economic discussion. The prevalent economy

of the century was mercantilism, which is not taken seriously now, but which was the only economics to which England paid much attention until Adam Smith appeared. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations did not arrest the attention of the English thinkers till

1776, by which date Wesley was seventy-three years old—too far along to try to revise whatever economic notions he had picked up.

In a word, mercantilism taught that a nation's material prosperity depended on a favorable balance of trade—more exports than imports—the balance owed on the exports being paid to the exporting

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nation in gold.

It was inevitable after the abandonment of the personal services, demanded by feudalism, and the substitution of payment in money made possible by the increase of coinage after the conquest of the Americas, men should think in money terms as never before.

Scholars say that mercantilism has not been given full credit for the services it rendered to the mercantilist nations in its maturity.

It is easy to see now the effect of all this 'balance paid in gold on the prices of the receiving country; and the prevention of a nation's developing the resources in which it is best fitted and importing from other nations the goods which they are better able to produce.

In so far as Wesley thought of economics at all, it was in a mercantile framework.

He accepted outright the mercantile principle that colonies exist for the sake of the mother country.

He was most at home in the sections of this field that presented discernible moral issues.

He was stiff with anything resembling financial delinquency.

Bankruptcy was abhorrent to him, probably because of the possibility of chicanery in bankruptcy proceedings.

Under date of December 9, 1772, Wesley wrote a letter to the editor of Lloyd's Evening Post, which is as nearly as anything a statement of his economic views. Look for a moment at the salient points in this letter:

He calls attention to the fact that thousands of people are starving in all parts of England.

He had seen one woman picking up sprats from a dunghill and carrying them home for herself and children "'and another gathering bones which the dogs had left in the street, to make broth." This was because of unemployment.

Many who once employed fifty men were employing only ten.

Food was so high that the "generality of people" were hardly able to buy anything else. Corn was dear because so much was used for distilling.

Oats were dear because there were too many horses kept for display.

Sheep and oxen were not raised because the breeders were raising horses.

Pork, poultry, and eggs were dear because of the monopolizing of the farms by enclosures. ""The land which was formerly divided among ten or twenty little farmers and enabled them comfortably to provide for their families is now generally engrossed by one great farmer." The dearness of victuals too is caused by luxury. "A person of quality will boil down three dozen of neat's tongues to make two or three quarts of soup" —amazing waste. "Land is dear because gentlemen cannot live as they

SPREADING SOCIAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

have been accustomed to do without increasing their income, which most of them cannot do but by raising their rents.

The farmer paying a higher rent for his land, must have a higher price for the produce of it. 'This tends again to raise the price of land. And so the wheel goes round."

Everything is dear because of the enormous taxes.

Why the taxes?

Because of the national debt. Where is the remedy?

Give the people work.

Cut out the distilling.

Reduce the price of oats by cutting down the number of horses.

In fact, stop all luxury.

Discharge half the national debt—and so on.

There are live nerves here.

I think the boldest step, socially speaking, Wesley ever took was his denunciation of enclosure. Almost from time immemorial English land had been farmed by distributing strips of cultivable ground among groups of farmers, each strip of three in turn lying fallow every third year. In addition, was the waste land and the common land from which the farmer could cut his firewood and get pasture for his cattle.

The farmers regarded waste and common land as their own.

Long before Wesley appeared great landowners were under one pretext or another enclosing this common land for their purposes—sheep runs, for example.

The result was that thousands of small farmers were ruined.

It was consummate social heroism for Wesley to criticize enclosure.

Much of this, perhaps all of it, causes the present-day technical economist to smile. He asks how England would have successfully coped with the demand for distilling.

He sees in Wesley's letter an illustration of fallacies which economists love to denounce.

He especially likes to remind us that rent of land—economic rent of land, that is—does not enter into the price of land produce.

All of which is conclusive enough to himself, with his familiarity with Ricardo.

Practically the control of England by the landowners till the passage of the Corn Laws was the most anti-social feature of England's history.

Nevertheless, it will not do to brush Wesley aside with a smile at his inadequate economics any more than it would do to smile at Christopher Columbus for not having better maps of the world.

Men like Ricardo and Malthus and Adam Smith were indeed at work on economic problems in the eighteenth century, and a little later Jeremy Bentham, but they had not yet so systematized their work, or even stated it, as to make it generally understood.

After it was published it was wrongly used.

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Apart from all this, we note the closeness of observation of Wesley, the genuineness of his common sense in fields where common sense could form an opinion, his sympathy with the have-nots or the have-littles, his passion against the inequalities in the distribution of wealth.

He stated, as well as anyone in his day certainly, the contrast between the condition of the rich and the poor. In the letter above quoted he tells that, while the poor women are gathering up the bones left by the dogs in the streets, the rich are living in more than lavish plenty. We have heard altogether too much about Wesley as teaching the poor to be contented with their lot.

To Jane Hilton he wrote in 1768, '""When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out the window." There was a time when the song that the poor are to "live on hay" here, in the confidence that by and by "'they'll eat pie in the sky," was urged as having especial reference to the preaching of the Methodists. Wesley was fearless and unsparing in bringing to the public the distresses of the poor and insistent in his urgency for their relief. That letter to Lloyd's was a fearless bit of utterance.

'The rich—especially the titled rich—did not like better than now having their extravagances pointed out. Nobody in the Church today is any bolder than was Wesley in his pleas for the poor.

Then as to the limitations of his economic knowledge.

We surely have not advanced much beyond Wesley in realization of the wastefulness of useless expenditure.

The prohibition of luxuries, such as gentleman's horses, for example, might not have helped the prosperity of the country as much as Wesley fancied, but he was putting his finger on a weak spot in the social organization of his day nevertheless when he talked about expenditure for display as waste.

Thorstein Veblen and Wesley are not far apart in this.

There are some aspects of English life which an American, especially one studying the eighteenth century, finds it almost impossible to understand.

Or, to put it more exactly, an American does not know the existence of some problems. I mention again something to which I have already alluded: the stratification of English society—the difficulty of a man's rising out of the class into which he was born, into a higher class, though under stripfarming a worker did get a chance to buy portions of arable land.

The American tradition has been that of climbing. It is the boasted tradition of Americans that, starting at the bottom, one can rise to the top. Abraham Lincoln once spoke of this possibility as a peculiar glory of American conditions.

Of course in some realms

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of activity this was possible in England, but the possibility was not part of English tradition or expectation.

The American did not often think of those who failed to get up. The adage itself, which reminded American youth that there was always room at the top, bore witness to the fact that not many got up, else there would not have been so much room at the top. Now, it was just as well, under the circumstances, to have one who could earn money, and did earn it, and who could speak out of first-hand knowledge without bitterness, informing his constituents that riches should be an entirely secondary aim.

'This was not otherworldliness of the paralyzing order, but hard common sense.

Looking back for the moment, Wesley's opposition to bankruptcy and to making money by handling "bills" and notes was a protest against making money, or getting money, by plans which seemed to be merely manipulative without productive effort. We have to consider that Wesley moved among groups which saw little actual cash, and who estimated money as veritable life's blood.

In 1756 he wrote: I have ''never put out six pence to interest since I was born."

A traveler in lands where the ordinary people do not see much "cash" is impressed and depressed by what seems to him the stinginess and meanness of the people in money affairs.

This is not due to niggardliness, inherent or acquired, but to the preciousness of money. We all know that the more money we have, the less value any particular piece possesses.

'The "marginal" value of the money is less, the more we have.

On the other hand, the less we have, the higher the value of each separate piece. Now, Wesley's converts were mostly among those to whom money was as valuable as the air they breathed.

This did not mean avarice or anything like it.

If it was materialism, it was the materialism of the poor.

The rich are materialistic in thinking too much of money: the poor, likewise, can be materialistic in thinking too much of money.

'They have so little of it that they must give too much attention to what they have. This renders intelligible the temper in which Wesley would regard men who made money by discounting notes and bills—"shaving' notes, to use the old expression.

These men seemed to him dishonest.

Even if they did not yield to opportunities to cheat, they seemed to be getting money by something like sleight of hand.

It was this realization of what money meant to the people that blinded the eyes of Wesley to any social service rendered even by those whom we might look upon as speculators.

Dr. E. D. Bebb

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states in Non-conformity and Social and Economic Life that the Methodists in London in ten years contributed fifteen thousand pounds to their own poor.

This would be seventy-five thousand dollars in our American money and would probably be worth, to the people who gave it, three times as much as it would be to us of today.

In all the emphasis on keeping the balance between poverty and riches Wesley succeeded in getting his movement well launched without dependence upon the well to do.

He said (in 1779) that "the rich make good scaffolding but bad materials for building a church." We have seen that, as soon as the Methodists became well enough off in this world's goods to be able to pay for chapels, they began to insist that the chapels were their own.

Wesley saw the peril here at once. He knew how unpopular his own teaching had been and how unpopular Methodist preaching must upon occasion be, if it were loyal to itself. How likely would a congregation of those increasing in wealth be to listen to any minister, except Wesley himself, on the perils of wealth?

His aim in keeping control of the chapels in his own hands was due somewhat to his own autocratic temperament, no doubt, but more to his desire to make it possible for the preachers to preach according to the spirit and aims of Methodism.

Here again we must hold before us the understanding that Methodism was a society and not a church.

The purpose was to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land.

The center of the Movement must be kept sound in order to do this. Much that would have been intolerable in a church was tolerable enough, indeed inevitable, in a society set on the one resolution, determined not to compromise.

Wesley was a wide reader in church history, especially of the early Church, if not a profound student.

He said repeatedly in various connections that the Christian Church suffered by becoming the official Church of Rome, which he called the greatest blow that Christianity ever received because of the flood of riches, honors and power it conferred especially on the clergy. We can see his wholesome fear of similar connections in this judgment, a judgment that has been repeated by practically all church historians.

It is admittedly easy to make sweeping generalizations to the effect that the Christianization of the Roman Empire was the Romanization of the Church, much easier than to make any valuable suggestion as to what the Church could have done other than it did. The

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barbarians had come upon Rome like a flood.

The result was somewhat like the choking effect when a mass of fuel, some of it slowly combustible and some of it not combustible at all, is thrown upon a fire burning brightly. The first three centuries of the career of the Church had been glorious in the profusion and variety and courage of Christian thought and practice, probably, as Bishop

Gore said, because the possibility that a Christian might at any moment be thrown into prison just because he was a Christian kept in the Church only those of high moral vitality.

It is a wretched story, that of the alliance of the Church and Rome. Now, Wesley never seemed to feel the same critical spirit toward the Church of England, itself an Established Church.

He called himself a Tory and a High-Churchman, and he knew that the Church of England had been left by the Reformation more Catholic than some of the Churches on the Continent.

The lofty ideal of the Church was always before him.

Nobody can read what he wrote and said to his followers without feeling that Wesley believed he could serve his Church best by keeping Methodism loyal to the ideals which had controlled it from the start.

Indeed, from his reading of church history, he must have known the part played in the history of the Roman Church by the powerful societies within that Church, and he had before him also the history of the societies within the Church of England.

A society within a larger body can succeed only as it refuses to compromise in preaching its ideal.

It has a right to exclude from its lists those who refuse or fail to live up to its ideals. Much of the success of the Roman Church has been due to its willingness to let the societies go as far as they would so long as they remained loyal to the Church itself.

If a group of Romanists have at any time desired to be ascetics, the Church has favored them.

If another group has sought to establish friendly relations with centers of financial strength, well and good.

In relation to the Church of England, Wesley felt that it was worth while to have within that Church a society which could avoid asceticism, on the one hand, and too considerate regard for wealth on the other.

'Thus it was that he insisted on keeping the assignment of preachers in his own hand.

Wesley fought a battle for free speech, as an Englishman.

It cannot be said that he allowed much freedom of speech within Methodism itself. He was altogether outspoken himself as to the

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perils of wealth, but it is doubtful if he would have allowed his preachers the same freedom that he took.

Their work was soulsaving. He himself would do the speaking for the society when it came to the attitude of the society toward the problems of this world's goods.

As to politics, the Methodists were free to speak on politics from the pulpit, if they praised the king.

Here, again, we must get back to Wesley's point of view. He had seen religious movements go to pieces when they became economic.

The danger was not so much that such religio-economic movements would upset or do harm to the established order as that they would lead to wholesale attack upon themselves by privileged forces.

If the Methodists had acted as did the peasants at the time of the Peasants' Revolt in Germany, they would probably have met a fate like that of the German peasants, though it is inconceivable that Wesley ever could have in such a crisis advocated ruthless killing of rebels as did Luther.

Here is as good a place as any to look at Wesley's Toryism, for Tory he was by his own profession.

If we strike out of Toryism the power which money gives, we have robbed it of considerable of its evil. Wesley was a Tory in that he had been well born, that he had been reared in the home of a rector of the Church of England, that he had been educated at Oxford. He inherited the notion of authority as vested in superior character rather than in superior position. He may not have thought of noblesse oblige, but he certainly acted on the obligations implied in the phrase.

In his regard for the inherent dignity of humanity he was a democrat.

It has been urged against him that he was not a republican.

He was not.

He had almost an abhorrence for the notion.

Just who, however, would have expected him to be a republican?

Here again we have to keep our dates in mind.

During the years when Methodism was coming to its strength, there was no such thing as republicanism actually at work on any scale which led to favorable reflections at all decisive.

England was not republican, and not even democratic.

'The House of Commons was too small, elected by too narrow a voting constituency to be representative of much more than the members who composed it.

It is probably not wide of the mark to say that an orator like Pitt, Burke or Fox had, during the later days of Wesley's life, only to sway convincingly a group of two hundred and fifty members in the House of Commons to shape fatefully the destinies of England and the British

Empire—a handful of persons easily to be brought within range of

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an orator speaking in conversational tones.

It was in Wesley's time that a notable continuance of the old battle over the personal authority of the king raged: George III making a stubborn fight to restore the power of the monarchy of the old days before Charles I.

As we look back at the conflict now we assume that George made a perfect score in doing the wrong things. Yet Wesley stood by him through thick and thin and with much reason, for George was honest and thoroughly patriotic.

He could not see how any country could desire a better king than George III.

Yet his fundamental feeling as to the artificiality of kingship shows in a sentence or two written in 1756.

He stood close when the king put on his robes, "a blanket of ermine around his shoulders, so heavy and cumbersome he can scarcely move under it, and a huge heap of bonny hair."

It is not necessary or wise to take seriously Wesley's views on popular rule. The doctrine of exemplary man in a state before civilization, with civilization as an agency which bound men with chains—the doctrine of Rousseau, in a word—could not have been expected to mean anything to Wesley.

Wesley knew too much about men without civilization for that. We have seen his opinion of the American Indians.

If Wesley had not gone to Georgia he, at one stage of his career, might have been captivated by Rousseau's pictures of man in his natural state. Not, however, after the experiences in Georgia.

Wesley held that the people could not govern themselves at all.

He declared early in 1736 that "the majority of people are not the wisest or best part." An aristocracy was better than popular rule, and a limited monarchy better than an aristocracy.

Remember, this was nearly two centuries ago.

The French Revolution had not yet arrived; the American republic was yet to come, and was not much of a republic when it did come.

The American State was for a generation or two an oligarchy.

'There were limits in America beyond which the statesmen of the day could not go in dealing with the people, but that is true almost anywhere. Wesley told one of his preachers that he must not do something or other.

"The people will not stand it," he said.

"They will not take that from you, and they will not take it from me."

Here, again, let us not hold Wesley to blame for what he was not trying todo. He was not trying to train his followers in political method. He was trying to spread scriptural holiness.

We get a little light here too by remembering that in those days of bad roads, or no roads, where in some places the roads were

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just the open commons, communities lived more to themselves than after the means of traveling had become better.

If these little groups had got started to debating all sorts of problems, Wesley's main point would have been lost.

'The question here is not as to what Wesley ought to have striven for, but as to what he was striving for. He was seeking to develop a group of likeminded Christians.

He himself was almost the only bond of union among the different societies.

He did not care to see his purpose thwarted by republican experiments in a world in which there was practically no republicanism.

'The preachers were not to preach on political themes, except as they praised the king. All such utterances would come from Wesley himself.

The formation of the Methodist societies did help on the democratic movement by training men to think and speak on social themes, but not in the Methodist preaching places.

It has been remarked, and that with considerable justice, that in dealing with historical and social questions Wesley judged almost entirely from the personal character of the leaders.

It is not hard to believe that Wesley's admiration for George III was largely due to George's being a man of prayer, to that and the royal favor repeatedly shown the Methodists.

Wesley never could appreciate the worth of Charles James Fox—Fox happened to be a gambler.

'That made it impossible for Wesley ever to realize that Fox was one of the most significant Parliamentary leaders, especially of a minority, that England has ever known.

Diverse as were their spheres, it would be an interesting question—academic I admit—as to whether

Wesley or Fox did the more for freedom of speech in the eighteenth century.

For "that rascal Wilkes,' Wesley had such wrath that he approved an outrageous denial of Wilkes's rights by the House of Commons.

Wilkes's personal dissoluteness was too much for Wesley.

The private evil more than overbalanced, in Wesley's mind, the public services Wilkes was rendering to democracy.

Americans should not forget that Wilkes made one of the most forceful pro-American speeches ever made in the House of Commons.

In 1770 Rousseau was to Wesley a "consummate coxcomb"; in 1773 David Hume was "the most insolent despiser of truth and virtue that has appeared in the world"; Jonathan Swift was "trash."

Wesley had even a sneer for Laputa, one of the keenest bits of satire in English.

So along the line.

Wesley pronounced Machiavelli's Prince just about the wickedest book ever written; Machiavelli,

"the first-born of hell.'"' It would have been better, instead of tak-

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ing out his righteous rage on Machiavelli, if Wesley had recognized and pointed out that the Prince was a formulation of the principles by which, in Wesley's time, kingdoms conducted their policies.

The wickedness was in policies which kingdoms were actually following, just as they are doing in some respects today. Wesley took the book as a personal offense committed by a very bad man indeed.

Another character whom Wesley evidently abhorred was Tom Paine—this, again, because of Paine's religious utterances.

This abhorrence was shared by thousands in England and America, and the feeling lasted more than half a century after Wesley's death.

Yet Paine was, as we see him now, one of the benefactors of his day, fighting for liberty in America, England, and France.

The oftquoted reference, by the late Theodore Roosevelt, to Paine as "a dirty little atheist'? has led to the equally oft-quoted reply that Paine was neither dirty, nor little, nor an atheist.

Yet it is not enough to say what Paine was not. A survival of orthodoxy and Puritanism prevented Wesley from seeing the services of Paine.

Even the deism of Paine was in its day a liberating influence.

Again, there was Wesley's hostility toward Voltaire.

Voltaire's Statement to one whose right to freedom of speech had been attacked that he would defend to the utmost the right to state such views, while he himself detested them, had quite an effect toward the same type of freedom for which Wesley was toiling.

If Voltaire had lived in England during the days when mobs were trying to break up the Methodist meetings, he would have defended the Methodists.

If Wesley had lived in France when Voltaire was being persecuted for his criticisms of the Roman Church, it is doubtful if Wesley would have forgotten the irregularities of Voltaire's private life long enough to have helped him in the battle for liberty.

I once heard a leading Methodist draw a contrast between the old age of Wesley and that of Voltaire.

It appears that Voltaire, along toward the close of his life, was approaching Paris where

he was to be given a public reception because of his continual battling against social abuses.

As the coach halted at a customs post near the city, the revenue officer inquired, as he looked into the face of Voltaire, "Anything contraband in here?"

To which Voltaire answered, "Nothing contraband in here except myself." The Methodist orator waxed eloquent over this as the utterance of a tired and wornout cynic in despairing disgust with life, and pictured the radiant hopefulness of Wesley at the same period of age.

It is regrettable but true that this is the type of stuff that was sup-

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posed properly to honor Wesley a half century ago, and it is further regrettable that the contrast was somewhat appropriate to the temper of Wesley himself. The words of Voltaire were anything bat cynical or despairing. They were intended to be witty, reminding the officer that he, Voltaire, was usually called contraband and expressing a joy of living and of preaching a defiant social righteousness quite as Keen and full as that of Wesley.

It is surprising to see how far Wesley's admiration for a leader of blameless personal character would take him in a praise which simply would not see public faults. Wesley had no patience with Cromwell or his achievements.

He declared that Charles I had been put to death because he had acted too much Like a Christian.

Tt will be noted that the death of Charles I was an event likely to arouse all the horror of one so regular in all his social attitudes as Wesley, and that Charles's way of meeting death would stir Wesley deeply. For there can be no doubt that, using the word "Christian" in its ordinary personal implications, the manner of the end of Charles was nobly Christian.

The dignity, the self-control, the calm confidence that he was about to exchange a corruptible for an incorruptible crown, cast a genuine spiritual glory over his meeting the execution.

It would be too much to expect to think that, in view of this Christian bearing, Wesley would not take the side of the king against Cromwell. We read in a book written a little later than the reign of Charles [ the following:

"Then the King, turning to Dr. Juxon, said, 'I have a goed cause and a gracious God on my side. Dr. Juxon: "There is but one stage more; this stage is turbulent and troublesome: it is a short one, but you may consider it will sure carry you a Very great way, it will carry you from earth to heaven, and there you shall find a great deal of cordial joy and comfort" King: 'I go from a cor ruptible to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbance can be."

Dr. Juxon: "You are exchanged from a temporal to an eternal crown, a good exchange.' * Another instance of Wesley's taking a prejudiced attitude was in relation to the American question. When the difficulties with the American colonies began, Wesley tried to make it clear te the English government that it would not do to wage war against the Americans. As days went by, however, Wesley took a distinctively

Tory stand. In 4 Calm Address to the American Colonies he seconded Doctor Johnson in "Taxation No Tyranny" so strongly as to lay himself open to the charge of having borrowed from the Docter

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a little too freely; but Johnson himself approved Wesley's statement, paying Wesley the fulsome compliment that he, Johnson, was satisfied to speak as long as Plato listened. There is no way of making Wesley's course in this crisis anything but Tory. To be sure, it may be said that Wesley, like so many other religious leaders before and since, was caught by the war fever, but that explanation does not amount tomuch.

There were many in England who were ardently on the side of the Americans.

Wesley was, if anything, caught in a Tory fever, and gave way to expressions of fierce impatience.

Nevertheless, he had more right on his side than we Americans are disposed to admit.

'Taxation without representation had practically come to mean more to Americans than to the English, who had very little to say about taxation.

The British taxes asked of Americans amounted to almost nothing.

'The Boston Tea Party was little else than vandalism.

George III was a much stronger and better man and king than Americans ever have admitted.

Wesley himself had to pay taxes without being represented in their assessment, and he could not see why the Americans had to declaim against taxation without representation.

Which shows how loosely Wesley got hold of the American idea that Americans had become different from Englishmen, and how thoroughly he had absorbed, probably all unconsciously to himself, the view of the English ruling classes that the Americans were a bumptious set of Englishmen to be taught to behave properly. 'The English view was mercantilism, a view in which colonies existed wholly for the benefit of the mother country, though in 1776 he referred to the merciless cruelty of the English despoilers of Hindustan.

If Wesley had been asked if he were a mercantilist, he would probably have avowed that he was not interested in names; but he would probably have taken—indeed, did take—a position substantially like that of the government, at least after the Americans had begun to fight. In 1775 he wrote that he was in danger of losing his love for the Americans because of their miserable leaders.

Again, he showed that he could not think of the Americans as other than sinners in need of repentance.

He could not endure the notion, and especially the fact, of insubordination, though he himself, as we have had occasion to see, always took it on himself to say how far he would obey his superiors, the bishops.

He obeyed the bishops, in so far as he thought they were godly, which usually meant in so far as they approved the views of John Wesley.

No; Wesley's own character, his training, his career, what he knew and what he did

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not know, put him out of the class of Englishmen who could be trusted to look upon the Americans with understanding. There were Englishmen who could do this, but Wesley was not one of them. The most that can be said is that, after the Americans had won their independence, Wesley, like so many of his class, accepted the accomplished fact, though calling it a strange fact.

Even while giving the Methodists their independence of Wesleyanism in England and bestowing his blessing on them as they went their way,

Wesley had to speak of their independence as brought about by a strange providence.

He adjusted himself to the American victory without understanding it. He accepted misstatements of fact as to the cause of the struggle. He wrote "a compassionate address to the inhabitants of Ireland," in which he said that the army of "General Washington" was fast melting away.

He gave as authority for this that he had met some one from Philadelphia who had told him so!

The question arises as to how well Wesley understood the currents toward a different England—socially and economically considered—beginning to flow in his time. The Industrial Revolution was well on its way, though perhaps in an underground way, before Wesley died.

With that Revolution came, we all concede, a material improvement in England, at heavy social costs. Wesley notes the beginning of improvement. He traveled his forty-five hundred or five thousand miles a year and declared, after fifty years of travel, that he knew England better than any other living man.

Travelers assure us that the best speed for traveling through a country, if one wishes to learn a country, is three miles an hour, the rate of one leisurely walking.

Even though he traveled first on horseback and later in a coach—"'chaise" he called it—Wesley walked thousands of miles—usually, twenty-five a day, twelve of which he spent in reading—and saw the life of the lowest classes in England at the closest possible range.

In his pastoral visits he went up into the attics and down into the cellars to visit the poorer members of his societies.

The roads, he declared, were continually getting better, gravel taking the place of earth trampled into mud.

This was no doubt true, but Wesley's tendency to disregard minor inconveniences probably kept him from being the best of judges on such matters.

One of his complaints against his wife was that she would not put up with the inconveniences of travel!

It is doubtful too if Wesley fully appreciated the bleakness of

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the age, to speak in the phrase of the Hammonds.

Wesley was so fed from within by the strength he needed and had such zest in life itself that he could appreciate the barrenness of the common life only in a scant degree. The long hours of work, the squalid conditions of living, the dearness of the necessities of life—these simply could not get hold of him as they got hold of the people who had to endure them. Wesley was a vital person, running over with life. As long as that stream was not thwarted or dammed up, his joy was complete, no matter what the inconveniences for the moment might be. Like others, he did not think much about some of the hardships, which, after all, come into men's lives without their taking much notice of them.

We do not know that some phases of life are hardships till after we have experienced something better.

All I am trying to do is not to make the times too dark. When we hear of the long working hours in Wesley's day, we have to remember that the laborer of that day labored a good deal in spurts, working four or five days at terrible hours and then taking two or three days off. Nevertheless, the times were dark enough. There was admittedly an increase of material goods at the disposal of the working groups, in the later years of Wesley's life, but all such increase is at first an increase of distress.

Old economic habits have to be broken up. There is friction and at times industrial warfare, when new machines displace old tools, especially the tools of handicraftsmen.

Food prices rise.

In the long run there is gain, but a particular generation may not get much of a chance at the long run.

It is not of exceeding comfort to one generation to tell it that, because of the changes, the next generation will have an easier lot. The question as to conditions here and now is most vital for each generation.

English workers are indeed remarkable for the degree to which they take the future of their children into the account; but, after all, when workers are struggling for their daily bread, when they are worrying about the loss of their jobs, they are not more open than others to consideration about the good time coming. Wesley saw the workers at close range, but he did not get as far into their minds as one would have supposed.

At least three factors had to be at hand to make the Industrial Revolution a success, not that anyone deliberately planned to make arevolution.

There had to be large sums of money for investment.

As soon as the mills began to pay, the money was forthcoming.

Some economists have thought that since the reign of Henry VIII

JOHN WESLEY

there had been heaped up sums in England waiting for profitable investment, and the most conclusive evidence of this is that the money did come forth.

A second factor—probably it ought to be called the first—was the application first of water power and then of steam power in factories, the machines being capable of relatively large-scale manufacture.

'This made mill centers on the banks of streams, displacing the former homework conditions in which the worker labored with his own tools, with his own hands, in hisown home.

Thirdly, the factory age was possible because workers were available to flock in increasing numbers to the new manufacturing centers, to work at machines which they did not themselves own, under conditions over which they did not have control.

The germs of about all the labor troubles since were planted in those latter days of the eighteenth century.

Wesley saw the population movements quite distinctly and noted them in his Journal.

In 1776 he declared that the population of England was greatly increasing.

He saw also the new demand for foodstuffs created by the growth of population around the factories.

He recognized the extent to which his followers were taking advantage of the new conditions and, by their industry and thrift, were "getting ahead."" As we have had repeated occasion to remark, he regarded this as a peril to the Methodist society.

Methodism flourished most in the new industrial centers.

It was in the new centers that men could take hold of a preaching and teaching ready to adjust itself to the new conditions.

Agricultural conditions in England in the eighteenth century were desperately conservative, though in the latter half of the century measurably scientific methods brought about almost revolutionary improvement in agriculture.

'There was not much chance for a larger farm population than the land was supporting, let us say, at the middle of the century.

The people in the villages settled down around the parish church and attended services or not, as they felt inclined.

At the new industrial centers, however, there was stir and bustle, and the people responded to Methodism in part because it too was stir and bustle.

After its fashion, the Industrial Revolution gave Methodism a chance.

As a preacher of honest labor for wages, of industry and thrift, Wesley helped supply the Revolution with a quality of labor as important as the quantity.

As we look at the latter years of the eighteenth century when events were hastening on to the fulfillment of the Industrial Revolution, we have almost a feeling of awe or dread. The vastness of

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the forces at work begin to show themselves and the outlines of the coming events seem to be taking shape.

England appeared to be settling itself around a new center, or at least around a center, for the England of the earlier centuries seems, economically speaking, not to be especially centralized.

'The agricultural conditions did not lend themselves readily to centralization.

'The farms were selfsufficient units without much immediate prospect of a raising of the standard of living. 'The enclosure proceedings had deprived many, many holders of small properties of their fields and had set them to roving about as landless wanderers.

The rise of the big industrial centers was attracting these landless, and the surplus workers on the farms. There was the movement of new life, of a definite stamp.

Goods were being made more to standard, markets were opening up overseas, ships were carrying larger cargoes.

This new life seems at first to have come along of itself, or to be the expression of forces beyond human control.

The promise in some material inventions is at first so slight that only a few catch their significance.

After careful reading of all of Wesley's Journal and Letters, I do not now recall any reference to the possibilities in steam power.

There are comments on Benjamin Franklin's discoveries in electricity and some little experimentation with an electrical machine by Wesley himself, but this only with curative properties in mind.

Till the close of the century, nobody seemed to realize the portentousness of the social changes that were almost at hand.

Of the larger social possibilities Wesley seems to have been as oblivious as anybody else.

I say 'seems' because Wesley must have observed much that he does not mention.

The Journal is not the handbook of general information it is sometimes represented to be. It is full of close observation of what Wesley thought to lie along his own line; aside from that it is notably barren. For example, historians of the eighteenth century have a deal to say about the lawlessness of England in that century, especially in London and upon the highways.

Wesley has almost nothing to say of this lawlessness except as it took the form of disturbing Methodist meetings.

He did once remark that he had traveled the English roads "without interruption." If the plight was as bad as the historians declare— and likely it was—on that evening of May 24, 1738, as Wesley went to the meeting in Aldersgate at a little after eight at night, he was lucky in not being set upon by highway robbers, not that Wesley would have been diverted from his purpose by such assault. There

JOHN WESLEY

must have been robbers all along the roads of England, but in traveling distances almost totaling, through his lifetime, the distance from the earth to the moon, Wesley did not see enough of them to make it worth his attention to mention them.

No doubt the lawlessness was rife enough, but it apparently did not impress Wesley.

Now, this is objective and presumably visible to the naked eye.

The less visible characteristics of the time Wesley did not see, or did not care to discuss. One cannot help wondering where Wesley kept his eyes, when the Poor Law was operating as it was in his day.

He probably felt that he was doing all that he could, when he sought to make Christian character or characters to meet the new day. Wesley held to the notion that, if we could get all men converted to God in an inner individual experience, all other difficulties—social, political, and all other problems—would offer no considerable obstacles.

'This hoary fallacy never met more complete demolition than in the relation of evangelical England to the Industrial Revolution.

As hoary as the fallacy itself, is the old, old inability of the Church itself to take the disproof seriously.

The reason for all this is plain enough on a little inspection.

Men acting in groups reveal tendencies that they may not show when acting as individuals separately.

Let the mass of the workers of a country, who have been struggling along at a poor dying rate, find new doors open to them and they enter the doors with no thought of the social consequences to themselves or anyone else.

That they do not longer work with tools of their own, but with machines that others own, that.as individuals they do not especially count and that they would better do just as their fellows do, transforms them for the time into a herd, with the herd instincts, especially of self-preservation, controlling them. 'The employing classes, caught in a fiercely competitive scheme, are at a longer distance from their individual workmen than in the old days when they hired only five or ten, and act impersonally.

They think now, not of men working for them, but of labor markets and "hands."

This goes on from bad to worse.

In a way the social experience gained in the Methodist fellowship did have noteworthy results.

Characteristically enough Wesley thought only of those affecting the specifically religious interests.

He feared that the Methodists would become well to do and thus lose their religious zeal. Whether this was lost or not, it is clear that the increase of material wealth must have added to the

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total of human welfare. The Methodists, no doubt, had to meet a different type of temptation as they got along better in the world.

There is no doubt too that it is possible to exaggerate the rigors of working conditions in the industrial age. Men had worked long hours in the preindustrial age. Hardships of a particular time cannot always be judged by themselves.

They have to be looked at in comparison with what went before. Men worked long hours before the Industrial Revolution was ever dreamed of. To be sure, they worked chiefly under their own direction, but it must have been a relief to some to have responsibility taken off their shoulders by mill conditions.

It has always been the "English way" to leave workers to do as they please outside of working hours.

There was not much time for themselves in the workers' lives in the eighteenth century, but what there was could be used as the workers thought best.

It is a proof that the workers were not utterly exhausted by working conditions that they rose at five in the morning to attend the Wesleyan meetings. That was a regular and not an occasional hour.

It would have been difficult to convince Wesley that there was hardship in any working conditions that got men out of bed at four or four-thirty in the morning, for he preached early rising as a religious duty for the good of one's soul.

In Georgia he exercised by swimming at daybreak, according to his Journal; this, however, because it was cooler then and it was easier to keep out of the way of alligators at four or five in the morning!

It is probable too that the emphasis on the quality of the work when the worker labored by himself in his own home has been overdone. Sidney and Beatrice Webb have told us that work done at home always tended to bad conditions in the home.

Of course a man's being away all day in a factory had its disadvantages, but his being at home, with almost everything about the house under the necessity of adjustment to his work, did not make the home attractive to him or to the other members of the family. Then all the talk about the artistic quality of products made when the worker controlled the whole process from start to finish must be heavily discounted.

As to this, many of us need no other authority than our own recollections. The clothes made by the village tailors of the old days may have gratified the artistic impulses of the tailor, but did not add to the aesthetic delight of those who had to wear the clothes or of those who had to look at them. There was occasionally an artist among the workers, but only occasionally. The excellence of the products was usually in solidity, in lasting quali-

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ties, which meant weight and coarseness.

Anything fine like lace was manufactured at extreme human cost.

No matter about any of this, though.

The machines came to stay.

'They have stayed and have brought all manner of social changes with them.

Religious organizations never anticipate such changes.

'They seldom see the changes actually going forward before their eyes.

They always lag behind while the first generation of workers, under the changed conditions, pay the penalties.

It would seem, however, that Methodism could at least have had more to say about the human values involved and wasted in those beginning years of the Industrial Revolution.

The older historians used to contrast the French and the Industrial Revolutions at the point of their constructiveness, the palm being usually given to the Industrial Revolution as surpassing in construction, as against the destruction wrought by the French Revolution. The French Revolution was out more in the open, where its guillotine horrors were in view of the public.

The horrors of the Industrial Revolution were under cover, many of them underground.

Methodism, though its avowed adherents numbered only about seventy-five thousand at the time of Wesley's death, ought to have been powerful enough to have created a social atmosphere which would have at least softened the horrors of the labors of women and children—especially in the coal mines.

We concede that the slightest familiarity with the significant dates of English history in the eighteenth century shows that the worst of these horrors appeared after Wesley himself had passed from the earthly scene, but our caution here does not quite face the issue.

There must have been a low estimate of the worth of women and children —of human beings, indeed—in a society where such conditions were possible.

'The Methodist leaders worked more intimately with the laborers than did any other religious leaders.

There ought to have been something in their view of humanity which would have made a difference from what actually came about.

If it be urged that the horrors of mill and mine conditions did not reach their peak till after Wesley had gone, we are not much relieved, for the tendencies were present from the outset.

The use of women for virtual draft animals to draw coal cars in mines would not have been possible if there had been any genuinely sincere thought of carrying out Wesley's estimate of the worth of either women or children.

Forthwith, however, we have to admit that, as to children,

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Wesley's own teaching must have been, if not to blame, at least a contributory force in the outrages by the industry of the time.

Wesley put children on the same plane as adults, except in actual years of age.

At the Kingswood School he made them get out of bed and go to work at five in the morning.

It was there that he published that crazy notion that he who plays as a child will play asaman.

He was blind to the need of the eighteenth-century man for more play. One of the wrongs perpetrated on the mature men of the time, as well as on the youth, by the enclosure of common lands was that the playing grounds for the English games were done away.

It isa comfort to read that the Kingswood School boys had enough raw humanity left in them, in spite of Wesley, to get out of bounds and not only play but fight with the children of the miners, to Wesley's horror. We must not forget though, that in his later years Wesley looked at a group.of children at play and had to admit that it was hard for him to believe that they were under divine wrath.

One of the unfathomable mysteries in nineteen centuries of Christianity has been the attitude of Christians toward children.

Perhaps it would be better to limit the remark to the centuries since the Reformation, for the old Church treated children better than did the Protestants.

The Calvinists doomed children to hell by the millions by divine decree; the Protestants of the Industrial Revolution sent children into an actual hell on earth, or under it.

Recurring, for the moment, to Wesley, we note here again his teaching that children must always obey their parents, obey as long as the parents lived.

It never seemed to dawn on Wesley that children are not in this world by their own choice, and that, therefore, the heaviest obligation on any generation is to the new generation which the older produces.

In nothing has the presence of the Divine Spirit in human life been more manifest than in the sheer inability of the older generation, in a period like the eighteenth century, to stamp all impulse to progress to better things out of the younger.

It may be said that, in all periods like that of the Industrial Revolution, men are at the mercy of blind forces which it is not possible to control.

This doctrine itself is one of the instruments by which at such times the more favored groups seek to keep the less favored in their place. In this utilization of a theory for practical purposes, the ruling classes in England of one hundred and

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fifty years ago showed consummate skill.

I am thinking, for instance, of the purpose to which they put the teaching of Malthus about population. 'Thomas Malthus was a clergyman of the Church of England who, in the early days of the nineteenth century, announced a theory of population to the effect that, if left to themselves, all forms of animal life, man included, will increase until they press on the food supplies till something strikes a balance; that man increases in geometrical progression and food supplies in arithmetical progression; that when men become too numerous for the food supplies, war, famine, disease, infanticide cut down the numbers till mankind starts to progress again to a new adjustment.

This theory has in its main outline stood the scientific discussions and attacks of at least a century and a quarter. The relation arithmetical and geometrical between the "progressions" has not been sustained, and in many details the law has been corrected and supplemented.

Malthus did not mean that mankind is to be forever at the mercy of impersonal inevitabilities.

He even insisted that, by late marriages and self-control, the numbers of mankind could be kept to the subsistence resources without being periodically invaded by horrible catastrophes.

Those making the most of the wealth-producing powers of the Industrial Revolution seized upon the Malthusian theory to maintain that men would produce offspring up to the limit of the food possibilities in any case and that, therefore, work for the lower classes at any wage was a mercy.

If, now, the privileged class could use a theory like this, was Wesleyanism living up to its duty in not matching such a doctrine with something more humane?

Bearing in mind always that the full force of the Industrial Revolution did not strike England till after the death of Wesley, was there not something that could have been set before Wesleyanism that would have sooner purged the Revolution at least of its worst horrors?

If the dominant economic theory came to be a perverted Malthusianism, could there not have been an emphasis on loving one's neighbor as oneself that would have made at least some headway against the false doctrine?

Or, conceding all the merit possible to Jeremy Bentham's "greatest good of the greatest number," was there no church group that could see that at one time the "greatest number' will ride the minority nearly to extinction, and, that worse still, the "least number" may tyrannize the "greatest number" into degradation?

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The truth is that after Wesley, Methodism took an unforeseen direction.

It is not worth while to ask if the Movement might not have better gone in another direction. 'The Movement released forces which had to run about as they did. With Wesley being as much of a Tory as he was, it probably was not to be expected that the Movement would remain a stirring of what we call, just for designation, the lower classes.

As far as it was related to economic issues, the Movement was upward.

One could probably find considerable evidence in the early history of Methodism to sustain the charge that in a class at all depressed there are lost fine talents, economic as well as other forms.

The Industrial Revolution gave sphere for abilities that without it would have gone to cattleand sheep-tending. Napoleon said of the French army after the French

Revolution that the strength of the army lay in that the knapsack of any, or every, private soldier carried essentially a marshal's baton.

With some allowance for rhetoric, it might likewise have been said that in the Industrial Revolution every worker carried somewhere about himself the possibility of rising to industrial captaincy.

In fact, however, Napoleon regarded the French soldiers as so much cannon fodder; and, in fact also, the industrial leaders regarded the workers as so much stuff to be used up in labor for profits for the employers.

To a degree the principles for which Wesley stood, and those for which the Revolution stood, were alike individualistic. Wesley taught the worth of the individual soul, and the Revolution, the right of the individual to get what he could out of the industrial order. Methodism said that God is for every man; the Revolution declared, "Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost."

There was not much individualism for the ordinary worker, except that if he did not succeed, he was left to himself.

Workers were looked at in the mass by the employers, but if they tried to act in the mass, they soon found out what employers as individuals could do. Adam Smith helped all this forward by his doctrine that an "invisible hand" guides all individualistic effort to the common good—another philosophy which employers as individuals used and degraded to the utmost.

The influence of Wesley may have counted in developing a group consciousness among the workers.

Tory though he was, Wesley had much to say about the uselessness of those highly placed in the social scale.

The English workers never have been much impressed by the nobility. They have been loyal to the king, but

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likewise loyal to their own groups—that is, after the Revolution revealed the limitations within which it must run, and showed that individualism was mostly for the employers. When the Labor

Party came to power a few years ago, R. H. Tawney, in an article in the Political Quarterly, 1932, remarked as a Laborite that if one of the party had to be made a Lord for the good of the party, one should be drafted on the understanding that the choice was not to be regarded asan honor.

This attitude comes down from the early days of the Industrial Revolution, and is far removed from that of the farm laborers dependent on landowners.

The Industrial Revolution benefited the classes which Methodism served. As Wesley feared, the qualities which made the converts good Methodists also fitted them snugly into the demands of the Revolution: industry, sobriety, honesty, thrift.

Wesley died thinking that his followers had so well learned the lesson of benevolent giving that they could be trusted not to lose their spiritual power as they became well to do. The lesson of individual giving had indeed been pretty well learned; but the lesson of a larger social redemption, through the care of the masses of the less privileged groups, had not.

The winning party in Methodism, in the years of social change in the first third of the nineteenth century, was on the side of conservatism and privilege. There is not much to the credit of Wesleyanism in the story of the Chartist struggles— of Wesleyanism, that is, as an ecclesiastical organization, especially that controlled by the Legal Hundred.

'The body called Primitive Methodists is entitled, according to the Webbs in the Story of the Durham Miners, to lasting honor.

Still, we must be careful not to try too strenuously to assess praise and blame.

There had not been anything quite like the Industrial Revolution since time began.

It meant the emergence of a titanic force, blind perhaps, but leading on, no one knew just whither. No one yet knew its final influence on civilization. Wordsworth sang of the French Revolution days, when to be alive at all was bliss and to be young was heaven.

Anyone thinking of the new mastery of nature as typified by the Industrial Revolution might at first have felt a similar thrill.

It was hard, however, to think of being young as like heaven after the guillotine got to working in Paris; and it was not calculated to give one a holy thrill after the Industrial Revolution got to making human beings old at twenty. If one is willing to enter a chamber of horrors for a little, let him read a summary of Sadler's Report as given in the Life of

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Lord Shaftesbury, by the Hammonds.

Joseph Hebergam, at the age of seven, was working as a spinner from five in the morning to eight at night, with a half hour off for lunch.

He had become deformed after six months of such work. Samuel Coulson testified that his daughter, not yet eight years old, worked from three in the morning till ten at night.

An overseer at Bradford testified that he had a list of two hundred families; that "all have deformed children," all of whom had been made crooked by the process of "piecening," which involved a "throwing up of the left shoulder and bending the right knee." Sadler's fight was fought in 1831, just about the date when Methodism ceased generally to follow

Wesley's advice to "give all you can" for the help of needy causes, and began to give a tenth, or less.

In face of this, with men like Macaulay, after the manner of their kind, professing sympathy with Sadler's aims and objecting to his concrete proposals, about all that Methodism could do was to praise the businessmen who tried to be a little better than most businessmen.

It is to be regretted that those who trace the influences of Wesley after he was gone, as so powerful that it prevented the "procession of tumbrils" to places of execution in London, do not discuss the failure, or inability, or indifference of Methodism in the presence of the outrage upon child-life in England in the years almost immediately following Wesley's death.

It is estimated that about twenty thousand persons were put to death in France during the French Revolution.

How does it happen that floods of tears have been shed over these deaths in France, and so little grief shown over the lot of children during England's Revolution?

There is altogether too much reason to believe that, in addition to the fact that the French Revolution was more dramatic and spectacular than the English, there was the other fact that the French victims came from a higher class than those of England to account for some of the tears shed over the victims of the guillotine.

One of the famous books in Methodist circles in England 3 during the nineteenth century was The Successful Merchant, by William Arthur.

Arthur was a recognized expositor among Methodists of the higher spiritual life. He wrote the Tongue of F lame, which was studied by successive generations of Methodist preachers for its teaching on the work of the Divine Spirit in the human heart.

According to the biography—for The Successful Merchant is admittedly an actual biography—the hero made Christian principle bear, with marvelous effectiveness, on the problem of personal ma-

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terial success. The virtues which he stood for and exemplified were those of uprightness, honesty, industry, thrift, frugality.

These virtues in the employed not only helped the employed along but the employer as well. The "Merchant" of the book was a benevolent despot.

He would not tolerate any deviation from his rules; claimed to have the power by looking at a man to discern whether he was "'straight" or not; was quick in discharging the unworthy.

He looked upon those who pleased him with a kindly eye, gave them gifts, and won from them a subservient deference.

The significance of this "Successful Merchant' was not that the Methodist Movement produced a man of this type merely, but that he was the ideal businessman of the Methodist brotherhood.

The book sold through a quarter of a century and ran into over forty editions, the last published as late as 1885.

This successful merchant came nearest of anybody in Methodist circles to adopting what is nowadays described as the doctrine of daily work as a calling. Max Weber, in Germany, and after him

R. H. Tawney, in England, have taught that Calvin helped the building up of modern capitalism by making the pursuit of one's daily work the heeding of a divine calling, and by transforming the sacrifice necessary for worldly success into an asceticism secular, but sanctioned by the divine plan. The truth here is clear on a little reflection, as is also the overemphasis.

Calvinism did not found capitalism.

It may, however, be that in the idea of the "calling" we have a rationalization most acceptable to those anxious to make, at one and the same time, the best possible of two worlds—that which is and that which is tocome. The capitalism of today did not take its start in a religious motive.

Money-making assumes its forms in each generation without much regard to religious ideals.

Most of the money-makers under the capitalistic system have never heard of a religious motive.

The ordinary worker of the world, as soon as he is on his own, starts out to make a living in whatever lies best to hand, which isat all available to him. Those who religiously guide him may seek to a larger or lesser degree to make religion count in his daily work.

The main drive is the pressure for daily bread; which is the drive of hunger; which is the drive for selfpreservation.

A leader like Calvin may seek to hold this drive in check, or to increase it, or to control it; but the drive is there, even if there are no Calvins about. This does not mean that the material forces are beyond human control, or that they are necessarily beyond religious control. They belong to that natural, which is first,

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and which is afterward to be made spiritual.

This emphasis on the function of the "calling" in the development of capitalism has not received elaboration till within the last twenty-five years.

Whatever importance the "'calling'' may have had must have been in the realm of adjustment and ease of mind, of the wealth-winner.

It is fine to talk about making our work, worship; but much depends on what the work is and on the notion of worship. We cannot help noting that Wesley wrote, in 1778, "For riches, the Calvinists beat us altogether."

To get back to the "Successful Merchant."" No matter whether Calvin introduced the idea of "calling" or not, this merchant is set before us and that by a religious leader of the Methodists, as finding

God ini daily work.

'The merchant seems to have had comfortable existence; and his life seems to teach that, if one will follow God in his daily business, God will bless him in that business.

The Successful Merchant must have offered aid and comfort to many a Methodist mind, the mind of the Methodist whose career was taking the course Wesley had predicted: arriving at wealth because of the cultivation of the virtues that, on the whole, tended to yield a money return.

Arthur's "Successful Merchant' was not a Calvinist, but he did illustrate Calvin's doctrine.

He was one of the men to whom the business situation, which came about in connection with the Industrial Revolution, gave their chance.

He would probably have succeeded if he had not been particularly interested in Calvinism, or Methodism, or any other religious belief; but he did make probably the best religious use possible of the conditions of the period and so is entitled to credit.

He must not be judged too closely by the later standards when men sought to assess the good and ill of the Revolution as a whole. 'There were not enough

Methodists who actually succeeded to make the experiences of the book typical.

"Calling" is one thing to the employer and another to the employee. Yet the fact of the enormous circulation indicates that the "Merchant" was the ideal to whom thousands of Methodists looked.

We have no sooner said that Methodism was not especially influential in checking the abominations of the Industrial Revolution than we have to pull ourselves up with the reflection that we are dealing with Methodism as an organized group, and especially with Legal Hundred Methodism. The evils of the Revolution, of the more outrageous stamp, were attacked and put out of the way

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through the leadership of one man—Lord Shaftesbury, an evangelical of the strictest order.

Shaftesbury is the man who said that Seeley's Ecce Homo was the worst book ever vomited forth from hell, whereas the book is a classic statement of that Christian humanitarianism to which Shaftesbury devoted his life.

It was through Shaftesbury that factory children and chimney sweepers got any human chance. The religion of Shaftesbury was the last word in intolerance.

He held it as a matter of life and death for Christianity to take literally the Genesis story of the creation of the world, the flood and Noah's ark. He considered that secular education without definite Biblical instruction meant the undermining of the State. He had no use for democracy.

Yet he was the instrument, so far as any one person could be, through which the savagery of the British industrial interests was tamed.

Shaftesbury was the incarnation, not of Wesleyanism, indeed, but of evangelicalism.

He had in him traces of fanaticism which would have worried Wesley, yet he had a furious passion for human welfare which he shared with no other evangelical, Methodist or otherwise.

As we think of his terrible rage at the manufacturers, we wish that Wesley, who lived long enough to see what the manufacturers were to do to the child life of the poorer classes of England, might have shared the rage.

It might have been better if Shaftesbury had had some of the broader, kindlier outlook on life which Wesley possessed, but not if it had slowed him down.

It required decades after the death of Wesley to get into Parliamentary effect the evangelical estimate of the worth of man as man in the abolition of the gross wrongs brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

Lest we put too exclusive a burden upon the Industrial Revolution, as if it alone were responsible for the evils of childhood exploitation, let us glance at another horror which it required decade after decade of strained effort on Shaftesbury's part to do away with, namely, the employment of boys as chimney sweeps.

The Hammonds point out that as early as 1773 the evils in chimney sweeping were denounced by a public-spirited leader in England.

Wesley must have known about evils like this, but he does not say anything of them.

It was customary to send children of from four and a half or five years of age to seven years, through the chimneys to clear them of soot, the chimneys seldom being more than twelve inches in diameter.

The elbows and knees of the sweeper had to be hardened in brine.

The soot was terrible in the respiratory passages; the chimneys were often filled with smoke and now and

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again were hot. Occasionally a boy fell into the fire and was burned to death.

It is estimated that when Shaftesbury began his fight on this barbarity there were four thousand chimney sweeps in England. There was something peculiarly diabolical in this abuse of childhood which reveals the low regard for human values in the social atmosphere in which Wesley worked.

When we turn away disgusted from the accounts of the pupils' experiences at the Kingswood School, at the frightful regulations of the place, let us remember that Wesley's regard for child life was far above the ordinary sentiment of the age.

In a period which saw little value in childhood, just on childhood's own account, Wesley did think of children as capable of spiritual salvation.

In that wretched story of frenzied, nervous excitement at the school, which Wesley pronounced a glorious revival, Wesley was at least investing the lives of the children with the same worth in the sight of God as those of adults—and that was something, even though Wesley did not seem to see much of chimney sweeps.

We pass to mention a few specific social evils to which Wesley gave heed.

There was smuggling, of which Wesley had much to say. By the way, it is to be noted that in his efforts for social betterment Wesley always did best against offenses where the wrongs were done by individuals acting as individuals and where the transgressions were of a rough order.

Historians have avowed that Wesleyanism was of definite benefit to Cornwall, some even going so far as to say that Wesley helped purge Cornwall of the awful crime of displaying false lights to ships at sea so as to wreck and plunder them. Wesley himself seems to think he did good in this direction.

There is not much evidence, however, that this wickedness was actually going on in Wesley's time.

Very good men have maintained that, in speaking of such alleged wrecking which was really plundering of ships already wrecked, Wesley unintentionally helped propagate a cruel slander.

Cornwall, however, was rough enough, and Wesley helped in its social salvation.

About smuggling: It is curious to observe that Wesley spoke of smuggling as robbery of the king, as if it were a personal injury to the king.

'That would give the evil deed point in Wesley's opinion.

Again, the goods were often gin and rum.

In a naive and human journal of the eighteenth century, Parson Woodforde, a rector of the Church of England, records that he himself used constantly smuggled spirituous liquor.

Indeed, he seems to have

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had his own smuggler.

Since the smugglers smuggled gin, that would add to the heinousness of the evil in Wesley's view.

He forbade the Methodists to drink spirituous liquors, tolerating only ales and wines.

I mention smuggling at such length because it shows Wesley's propensity to attack evils without paying much attention to the demand out of which they arise.

He would have the smugglers cease smuggling, which would, of course, have disposed of the evil; but he did not pay much attention to that force of demand which kept the industry thriving.

Smuggling was bad enough, but was not as important as some other evils of Wesley's day.

It is not surprising to see him pay so much attention to it, but so much attention as compared with other evils.

In a crime like this, however, there was something that Wesley's objective and scientific mind could positively take hold of. A man was a smuggler or he was not. He bought smuggled goods or he did not.

Wesley's attitude on slavery was consistent throughout.

He had from the outset of his public career called slavery the sum of all villainies and American slavery the vilest under the sun.

We are fond of quoting his letter to Wilberforce, a noble letter indeed, but written when Wesley was near the end of his life. Years before Wesley had denounced slavery, that of England and especially that of America.

He wanted the system abolished by definite social action. On this problem, he was wholly on the right side, as were many outstanding evangelicals of the time. I cannot forbear quoting here verses from one whom the evangelicals are always pleased to honor

—William Cowper.

Cowper had a distressingly melancholy history, with stretches of bright mental sunshine darkened at fearful crises with half madness, perhaps madness outright.

We think of Cowper in his happier spiritual moments, writing as fine spiritual poetry as the evangelical movement knew:

"For thou, within no walls confined, Dost dwell with those of humble mind; Such ever bring thee where they come, And, going, take thee to their home."

This bespeaks a quiet, meditative mind, in tranquil communion with the Divine.

Here are verses of another order, which I quote to show the presence of the same factors working in behalf of the slave trade, as work in behalf of even the most monstrous evils in all generations, the poem being long but perennially up to date.

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"PITY FOR Poor AFRICANS"

"Video meliora proboque, Deieriora sequor.

"I own I am shocked at the purchase of slaves, And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;

What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans, Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.

"I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, For how could we do without sugar and rum?

Especially sugar, so needful we see; What, give up our desserts, our coffee and tea!

"Besides, if we do the French, Dutch, and Danes Will heartily thank us, no doubt, for our pains;

If we do not buy the poor creatures, they will; And tortures and groans will be multiplied still.

"A youngster at school, more sedate than the rest, Had once his integrity put to the test; His comrades had plotted an orchard to rob,

And asked him to go and assist in the job.

"He was shocked, sir, like you, and answered: 'Oh nol What! rob our good neighbor? I pray you don't gol

Besides, the man's poor, his orchard's his bread; Then think of his children, for they must be fed.'

" "You speak very fine, and you look very grave, But apples we want, and apples we'll have;

If you will go with us, you shall have a share, If not, you shall have neither apple nor pear.'

"They spoke, and Tom pondered—'T see they will go; Poor man! what a pity to injure him sol Poor man! I would save him his fruit if I could,

But staying behind will do him no good.

"If the matter depended alone upon me, His apples might hang till they dropped from the tree;

But since they will take them, I think I'll go too; He will lose none by me, though I get a few.'

"His scruples thus silenced, 'Tom felt more at ease, And went with his comrades the apples to seize;

He blamed and protested, but joined in the plan; He shared in the plunder, but pitied the man."

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Wesley, I repeat, was sound on his attitude toward slavery, sounder than Whitefield, for example.

Wesley's mind was singularly free from illusions on questions like slavery.

Perhaps one reason was that he did not allow himself to get tangled up in a material or financial way with the evils. Whitefield had the Georgia

Orphanage to look after.

He accepted slaves for the work there, and then added to the number by his own purchases.

'There is no record of Wesley's being compromised in any similar fashion.

His followers in America became tied up with slavery to an extent which rendered American Methodism, both North and South, a poor, halting thing on the larger social issues for nearly a century.

Francis Asbury was sure of the wickedness of slavery, but did not see what he could do about it, administratively.

There did not appear to be any other way of developing the resources of the South than through slavery. When Thomas Coke traveled with Asbury through America he was critical, even impatient, of Asbury for a lenient acquiescence toward the buying and selling of human beings.

It is impossible to say what attitude Wesley would have taken on the traffic in men, if he had accepted the invitation of the American Methodists to visit America in the years just after the Revolutionary War.

It is perhaps worth while to think of the straightness of Wesley's record on slavery, because slavery was capable of the most plausible arguments in its defense of any of the historic social evils.

Of course there it stands in itself as the flat denial of the most fundamental of human ideals: the worth of a man as an end in himself.

Look, however, at the arguments, with the caution always in mind that the present writer is not making a defense of slavery but is seeking to show reasoning which went in Wesley's day. 'This has more than historic or biographical relevancy.

In essence it bears on the relation of Methodism and of Christianity, for that matter, to the spread of the kingdom of God in social contacts in all ages.

The first argument was that slavery was not to be taken as a thing in itself; that it was better than what it supplanted: the killing of prisoners in war.

Just how that bore on the slavery of Wesley's day was never made evident.

'The argument changed into the form that slavery had been here as long as the mind of man could remember and that civilizations like that of England in the West

Indies and of America in its Southern territories could not get on without it. It was pronounced an evil, but an inevitable evil.

Las Casas, the apostle to the Indies, one of the noblest fighters for

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humanity the world has ever seen, encouraged the importation of slaves from Africa into Spanish America to save the Indians, who were being exterminated by slavery.

In his last years Las Casas regretted and repented of this advice, but the repentance was altogether too late to undo the harm.

Wesley met this argument by denying that conquerors ever had any right to kill prisoners taken in war; and by insisting, rather academically, that men are not to yield to evil, however inevitable it may seem.

The other effective argument was that Negro slavery gave the Negro a chance which he would not otherwise have had. This was, of course, a rationalization, but so sincere that it could not always be called such.

Take the case of the Indians again. Nobody who reads the history of the conquest of Spanish America, can for an instant doubt that the conquerors were in part moved by a genuine desire to convert the Indians.

GoJd and souls made the double motive. Religion was more consciously present in the minds of the men of those days than now.

One dubious result of the Protestant Reformation was that that Reformation brought about such a division between secular and sacred that men did not definitely think as much about religion afterward as before.

We read that old story about the peace of mind of the pious sea-captain Newton, as he sailed from Africa to America, with a cargo of Negroes captured to be sold as slaves. What a hypocrite he must have been! Not consciously. His experience of peace, of communion with the Divine may have been genuine.

Men in all ages have done wrong ignorantly and in unbelief.

There were thousands of slaveholders in the British colonies and in America who maintained that slavery gave the Negro his chance; that. at least he was better off in slavery in America than in liberty in Africa.

The defenders of slavery in the United States have always insisted that, comparing slavery with the conditions of the Negroes in Africa, slavery was an advantage to the Negro.

On the material side it is yet to be proved that those who advance this argument are not right. Even with the white man in Africa, perpetrating today outrageous wrongs upon the Negroes through such institutions as forced labor, the white man will prevent killings by the witch doctorsif he can. To be sure, there is merit in the native customs and institutions of peoples, but in these institutions the native peoples practice cruelties on one another. Within the memory of men now living the populations of African villages have been summoned by drumbeat to hear the sentence of doom passed upon a poor Negro

JOHN WESLEY

by a witch doctor, to see his head cut from his body, the witnessing natives shouting hysterically as the head fell, the hysteria being that of the relief of every uncondemned native that the death decree had not fallen on himself. The slaveowners in the British colonies never did anything like that. They were not as bad as witch doctors.

British control of slaves in Jamaica, for example, was just enough —if there can be justice under slavery—to lay a foundation of knowledge of what justice is, strong enough to make, when freedom came, a society of free Negroes which calls forth the admiration of all students of such problems. When Wesley was denouncing slavery, he was denouncing a situation in defense of which much could be said; and much was said. Moreover, in all such public problems men are inclined to be specialists.

They are interested in one benefit to men rather than another.

Wesley met this argument of good to the slave through slavery by condemning it as insincere. He would listen to none of it.

Now, I have drawn all this out at length to illustrate the directness of Wesley's moral insight when the violation of human rights was involved.

Wesley heard all these proslavery arguments.

He knew what Whitefield thought and did. He knew the practical considerations which made slavery seem so inevitable to so many.

Yet to him slavery was the sum of villainies, and he said so.

Moreover, he saw the denial of the higher rights involved in slavery.

He knew American slavery, which he called the vilest under the sun, back in the days when the colonies were part of Great Britain.

Yet, when he wrote to Wilberforce, he talked of such matters as the law's refusal to take the word of a slave as evidence in a court.

This is to put the whole question on a high plane.

In that letter Wesley referred to a tract on slavery, written by an ex-slave—and most excellent writing, if the present author is any judge.

The book tells of the physical horror of slavery—and of much more.

It is interesting to note that Wesley seized not upon horrors as the chief wrongs, but upon the denial of a slave's right to have his word taken as that of a man.

Another reason for stressing slavery at such length is that slavery, in one form or another, is perennial.

It is one of the old foes with a new face in every generation.

Peonage is virtual slavery.

It is no longer possible to buy outright a human being from another human being, but it is possible to buy human beings from themselves, driving such terms with them for their labor that the man who has been forced to sell himself is not free.

Of course a

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man's sale of his labor may be a glorious manifestation of an individual's right to dispose of his services as he sees fit; and to enter into co-operation with him who pays him.

This is not the situation of which I speak, however.

Much of the eloquence today in behalf of the freedom of the laborer to bargain means merely his right to take or leave what is offered him.

If he acts by himself, there is but little chance for him for freedom worth having. To be free there must be fair remuneration, some leisure, some power of self-direction.

It may be that the latter-day slave is not lashed by the whip of an overseer, but he may be virtually chained to the machine.

All this is characteristic of modern industrial life, and all this is in direct line with the slavery which Wesley so openly and flatly denounced.

There is no freedom where one of the alternatives, from which aman is to choose, is heavily overweighted, so heavily overweighted that the other alternatives do not count.

If the choice is between a particularly evil course and starvation, the choice is likely to swing to evil, and is not in itself to be called immoral. A hero may say that he will starve rather than to do wrong, but he does not leave an imitable example for the ordinary man.

We have practically to assume that, if the choice is between life with evil and good with starvation, it will take the evil. The whole system under which men live has to be filled with that assumption of the worth of man as man, which Wesley declared in the attack on slavery.

This, after the criticism of enclosure, was Wesley's boldest assault on a social evil of his time.

Wesley was opposed to the distilling of spirituous liquors.

His rules forbade the use of such liquors, though the rules did not succeed in making the early Methodists into total abstainers.

It is usually objected to Prohibitionists, using the term as referring to those who would do away with the use of alcoholic liquors as beverages, that their main moral effort seems to be interference with the _ personal habits of people other than themselves for the sake of the moral improvement of those persons.

Wesley did not have any noticeable scruples against inquiring into the private affairs of his followers, but he did not put his objections to distilled liquors on the effect of liquor drinking on the character of the drinker.

That aspect he urged on the drinkers indeed, but he objected to the distillation of liquor on broad social grounds, as that in one year of his lifetime England distilled eleven million gallons of

JOHN WESLEY

spirits.

Such distillation pushed the price of grain up so that it could not be used for food.

Here, again, he had to meet those who sought the largest possible return for their grains. 'These were a perennial foe.

Still we swing around here on the same old circle, or the circle which has proved itself new with every generation.

If the demand of the drinker could be cut down, more grain could be used for food.

So the personal interest in the reformation of drinkers applied after all.

Yet the economists can smile all they please at Wesley's economics of the liquor traffic. The drink problem was one of most serious questions in the England of Wesley's day.

In this field we again run into Wesley's extremism.

An extremist is seldom discriminating.

It is always easier to be extreme than discriminating.

Usually a reformer is a specialist.

He thinks if he can get his one reform through, that his victory will carry everything else with it; or, if this does not happen, his measure is the most important anyhow. There are moral leaders though who develop the extremist habit of mind in everything.

Wesley was firm and unyielding as to fiery liquors, but at one stage of his crusading interest he carried his passion against drink over into an opposition to tea drinking.

He wrote a long tract against tea, useful as showing what he could do to make out a case on trivial grounds.

One phase of progress in moral custom Wesley did not seem to master.

He did not see that sometimes better customs take the place of worse; that an increase of tea drinking may mean the decrease of drinking something stronger.

'There was enough of the ascetic in Wesley to prejudice him against any victory over evil by substitution. He enjoyed his moral struggles. He would have rejoiced more in the struggle of a will in the agony of a terrible appetite than in victory won by the use of a substitute, however innocent.

After Wesley had gone, England did, purposely or not, substitute beer for spirits.

'To read through the arguments of those days one would think one was listening to the speeches for the repeal of our Eighteenth Amendment.

Nothing was said in those speeches that had not been said in England a hundred years before.

In that day the greater use of beer left the social situation about as bad as ever.

A curious glimpse of the peculiarity of Wesley's mind can be seen in his feeling about suicide. He could not endure the thought of one's taking one's own life, and sought to prevent suicide by urging a law that would hang in chains the bodies of all those

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who killed themselves. This was a strange twist of thinking. Just what difference it would make to a suicide to have his body exposed in chains after his death does not appear. Hardly anything more futile could have been suggested.

Moreover, it is significant of a queer callousness prevalent in the times.

The only conceivable deterrent in such cases would have been the notion of public disgrace. What can be said, however, of the effect of such spectacles on the public? Probably the truth is that Wesley, like most others of his time, had become used to such horrible spectacles. If this be so, it is a fearful commentary on the finer feelings in England in the eighteenth century.

We have looked at several of the specific measures and attitudes through which the influence of Wesley worked to make

England better socially. Perhaps, when all is said, this influence cannot be measured or estimated. We are dealing with those imponderable forces which go to making social atmosphere.

Imponderables come out of all sorts of general conditions—sometimes out of what may be called the general working together, or focusing, of powers which may not seem to bear directly upon a given problem.

As we now look back at Wesley's day, we see that his life worked, all unconsciously to himself, to fit into a situation hastening toward three of the greatest revolutions of our modern age: the French, the American, and the Industrial.

Each of these was the outcome of factors that had been working through generations.

In addition to these there were the political and ecclesiastical changes in England itself which, after the "glorious Revolution of 1688," cleared the path for Protestantism.

'The religious indifference in which Wesley began his work was really a prophecy of something better than the strict control for which the old Church had always stood.

We hear much about the cool rationalism of the eighteenth century.

Some of it was just the mind of the age coming to its own power, taking advantage of a freedom which refused to be hurried into anything which did not have the sanction of the mind itself. Through long processes in England there had been a gain in intellectual and moral freedom.

It has been said that one reason why there was no French Revolution in England was because the middle class in England already had enough of what the middle classes in France were striving for to deprive a revolution of the French type of decisive appeal.

'The French Revolution in a degree brought the bourgeoisie as a social force

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out into view.

Neither the English Revolution of 1688, nor the French Revolution a century later, was proletarian in any strict meaning.

Both Revolutions meant that both the English and French Revolutions had put a new spirit into the mind of the middle classes. The American Revolution meant that the English civilization was, in a manner, getting a new start free from some of the useless baggage it had to carry in England.

It was a revelation to England itself, and to the world, of what English ideas could do when stripped of their nonessentials, or when stripped of features which did not seem essential anywhere but in England. When thus stripped, they helped develop an Americanism quite unEnglish.

Puritanism in the Church and the political relief in England from Catholicism, had set the world toward a genuinely new individual and social life.

It remained for the American Revolution to show what this type could mean both for good and ill where it had a chance on a frontier free from those class divisions that amounted almost to caste, and where it gave a man opportunity to see and show what he could do on his own.

Nothing could be more significant in its way than the horrified surprise of the English, even of the type of John Wesley, when America began to "'talk up" to England as she did.

In 1789 Wesley wrote that Asbury "refused flatly to accept Mr. Richard Whatcoat in the character I sent him.

He told George Shadford: 'Mr. Wesley and J are like Caesar and Pompey.

He will bear no equal and I will have no superior." On the political and, speaking generally, the social side, Wesley had taken the Americans as inferiors.

His utterances after the war broke out had revealed this all too clearly.

In England this revelation of independence by English colonists brought a new something into the atmosphere.

It is the custom of some who talk of unity among nations to deplore the American

Revolution as breaking a unity which by our day might have given the world the greatest manifestation of social and political oneness that mankind has ever seen. When we realize the unconscious and involuntary attitude of men like Wesley toward the Americans though, we find it easy to adjust ourselves to American independence.

'The dwellers at the central nation of an empire have always found it hard to think of the dwellers in colonial territories as equal to themselves.

So far as we can see, it would have been a calamity for the Methodists in America to have remained in any measure subordinate to the English.

They had ceased to be English.

American political independence also did much for Eng-

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land.

It was through the attitude of the American leaders that an idea dear to Wesley, the necessity of an actually ruling monarchy, received some of its stiffest blows.

Let us not forget, however, that after pouring out the vials of his wrath on America, Wesley made his adjustment to American independence, especially as concerns Methodists, within a year after peace was signed between England and America; and called the separation providential, though strangely so.

Of the Industrial Revolution, we have spoken enough, but a sort of line brings us back to it. Methodism reached down into the classes that the Revolution was to touch as workers.

It made over some of the lower classes by helping them to take advantage of the chance to rise, materially speaking, in the world.

It was probably too acquiescent in the face of the evils.

Here we have to be very careful.

Thinkers like Harold J. Laski insist that Wesleyanism hindered the advance of the workers by making them too acquiescent.

Probably it was just as well that the ideas of the worth of men for which the whole evangelical movement stood had time to take deep root in the mind of the workers before the actual battle for better conditions began.

'This is speaking generally.

Nothing can excuse the savagery of the earlier factory owners, or of the later ones.

Nevertheless, part of the fullness of the time to which Wesley attained was that his teaching as to the worth of men to themselves and to one another and to God had been going forward long enough to impress the public mind, or to make possible the creation of a sentiment which Shaftesbury could use for human rights in the factories. Moreover, the difficulties of Shaftesbury's fight reveal, as not much else can, the desperate state of that England in which Wesley had wrought: the willingness of masses of men to work under inhuman conditions; the low regard in which the women and children were held in industry, together with what was conceived of as the absolute necessity of the services of women

children; the slowness, even the deadness, of the social interest of the ruling classes in England—I refer especially to Parliament— in giving heed to human values.

It is the old story of the paralyzing power of desire for gain over the more humane instincts—one of the manifestations of this power being the unwillingness of those in control of an industry to set themselves seriously to the task of working out improvements.

The Wesleyan Movement is an illustration of the time it requires, or did require, for a new consciousness of human worth to find expression in actual industrial

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changes.

Sometimes the consciousness simply does not connect itself with the economic realm at all, either in the purpose of employers or employed. Men are prone to take things as they find them and to adjust themselves to actual situations.

Here was the service rendered by the trade-unions, which, however, did not begin to make themselves thoroughly felt till fully half a century after Wesley had gone.

They were not only instruments of power in action but of the communication of feeling.

I do not mean to be frivolous when I say that they roused workers to the consciousness of hardship and injustice.

It used to be said that the workers would have been all right if the unions had left them alone; that they were not conscious that they were having a hard time till the unions told them so. No greater praise could be given the unions of those days than just this: that they roused workers to a consciousness of their own needs.

Here, again, may have been at work a force that was generated, or whose possibilities were revealed by, the Methodist meetings.

If I seem chary of giving unstinted praise to the preaching of the Methodists as lending that dignity to men's attitude toward themselves which finally found expression in better laws as to working conditions, may I say that I am not stinting the praise, but that I am trying to indicate the length of time it takes for such realization to get to work in the world where men are busy with earning their daily bread. Wesley did not see, perhaps did not think of, the economic implications of his teaching as to the worth of a man's soul.

Probably he would have opposed trade-unions if they had begun to show force in his day.

Shaftesbury hated them.

Most probably Wesley would have seen in them rivals to his societies.

Moreover, Wesley was so much of an autocrat himself that he would not have had much sympathy for the limitation of autocracy in industry.

All forward movements depend for their final success on what we today are fond of calling "implementation." An actual method, or technique, must be found to carry out the moral insight into legal or other practical expression. When the proposals for such implementation become serious, the opposition becomes serious, not to say furious.

We cannot blame the leader of a movement for not being himself able to suggest means of implementation. There is, however, something wrong if there is not vitality enough in the movement to keep up an insistent and persistent demand for the actual working out of the change.

Before we leave this theme of Wesley and his century we look

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at the criticism of men like G. D. H. Cole, who insist that, allowing as we must for the greatness of Wesley's work, his influence on the mind of the classes among whom he worked was not always of the best.

Cole seems to imply that Wesley allowed his followers to hold fast to ideas which were socially harmful.

It is difficult to deal with this criticism because of the complexity of Wesley's own character.

There is a temptation, as we look at Wesley's sharp statements of religious duty, to think of his power as arising from a straightforward directness—until we see that the simplicity lay only in one direction.

We have here something of the difficulty we have when we read Wesley's avowal that he was a man of one book, the Bible. We know today what Wesley meant, but in the mind of the readers to whom the remark was first addressed it called for explanation. So Wesley appears at times so clear and logical and direct that he seems a child of the eighteenth century itself, abhorring anything without a sharp edge. Even in studying the influence of the divine on the human, he is as careful and systematic as a thoroughgoing rationalist.

He contemplates ecstatic states as a scientist would.

Yet we no sooner say this than we have to think of belated superstitions which he was among the last to give up, superstitions which lingered among the minds of the lower classes especially, and which he ought to have denounced or ought to at least have been in a position to denounce.

For example, there was witchcraft.

Trevelyan, in his Age of Queen Anne, has remarked that in England the deliverance of the lower classes from witchcraft was a gift of the higher classes to the lower.

The respect of the lower classes for the higher was so deep that, when the humbler people saw what they called their "'betters'' casting witchcraft aside, with something like amused scorn, they too began to let go the belief.

If this is true, Wesley was remiss in his leadership of his followers.

It is easy to smile at Wesley's notions of witchcraft as a whim, but the fault is too serious for that.

It 'was in Wesley's own lifetime that hanging for alleged witchcraft was done away.

'The belief in witchcraft might have done immense harm if, at a moment of crisis or public excitement over some queer old woman, Wesley had come out with one of his dogmatic statements of belief in witchcraft.

On matters of this kind he was dogmatic.

It was only in his latest years that he said that he had become less certain of almost everything as time had gone by. In 1768 he had not given up the belief in witchcraft.

When Wesley became dogmatic he was stubborn.

The only

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reason he had for accepting witchcraft was that, if he did not, he felt he would have to give up the Bible.

He did not feel quite thus when he was denouncing Calvinists who claimed to have the Bible on their side. What he then said was practically that, if the Bible meant Calvinism, so much the worse for the Bible.

Wesley could be firm in most unpleasant fashion when he was exercising his will-to-believe, especially when he had nothing but the willto-believe.

We cannot blame critics who suspect that, in all this standing for popular superstition, Wesley was perhaps unconsciously to himself keeping hold of that popular fear which he knew how to arouse for religious purposes.

If this seems harsh, we feel justified in reminding our readers that, in that morbidly frenzied excitement among the Kingswood School boys which Wesley pronounced a work of divine grace, he permitted the taking of the boys to see a corpse in order to increase their terror.

In all of this dark side of his mind probably Wesley was sincere enough, but that does not relieve the notions of their character as a social menace.

It is only fair to say of Wesley that he held fast to such superstitions as beliefs in witches and ghosts long after other leaders of intelligence had given them up; and, when he had to face something of mild ridicule for his support of such things, Wesley would not stand it to hear the famous noises in the Epworth Rectory spoken of skeptically. As already remarked, Wesley was not at home during the disturbances by "Old Jeffery,' yet he was the most partisan defender of the supernatural character of the disturbances.

It is hard to resist the impression of mild amusement at Wesley's acceptance of the genuineness of spirit appearance which both Johnson and Boswell give us in one of their references to Wesley. Johnson gave to Boswell a letter of introduction to Wesley, that he (Boswell) might get from Wesley the grounds for belief in a ghost reported to have appeared at Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Boswell got a very polite reception but no satisfactory evidence about the ghost.

Looking over the whole eighteenth-century drama, we see now that Wesley was himself a giant walking among giants.

Whether there is or not something in the social atmosphere of particular eras which calls forth clusters of geniuses the world around, the historic fact remains that the geniuses do come in clusters, and did in the eighteenth century.

We think of Goethe and Kant in Germany; of all the actors in the French Revolution, beginning with Rousseau and ending with Napoleon; of George

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Washington and the founders of the American republic, to say nothing of the Pitts, of Burke and Fox; of James Watt, of Swift and Addison and Pope, as all contemporaries of Wesley.

It would be folly to try to compare these characters with one another as to the quality of their lives.

For sheer continuous putting forth of energy, however, especially when we reckon years of activity, Wesley stands at the head.

Moreover, he lodged in his teaching a carrying power which sent it pretty well over all parts of the world where the English had gone or were soon to go.

For one effect of the Industrial Revolution was to provide a world-wide increase of England's foreign trade. Cheaper goods in the end meant larger markets.

'The nineteenth century saw the beginning of the making of ships that could carry immense cargoes.

All this meant the expansion of world trade. Where trade went the Methodists went.

In dealing with historic characters we usually speak as if they foresaw what was to come in the days ahead and give them credit for that vision. They are entitled to the credit, but not for the vision.

Wesley did not foresee such a wide spread of Methodism.

It was only in his last years that he or anyone else got any glimpse of what was at all likely to happen in America, for example.

The credit is his for being ready to enter any open door without necessarily being able to see what was beyond the door.

More than that, if the door did not open easily, he pushed it open. The old jibe against him was that he was like a man rowing a boat—that he never saw anything until he had passed it. To which the answer is that this is the -way men row boats, and the way leaders travel to revolutionary changes. They know that they are ona navigable stream and that they are moving; but all they can see unmistakably is in the past.

Leadership in any crisis is more an indescribable feeling of direction than an open vision.

It is an awareness that the right road is in one quarter rather than in another. Leaders cannot at the moment of choice tell why they take one path rather than another.

When they try to tell, they cannot always give the reasons. eiaen :

It has been noted that Wesleyanism in the main followed the course leading to the Industrial Revolution.

The most responsive centers to Methodism were industrial.

We might almost say that the Revolution created a new class in England, and all over the world, for that matter wherever the Revolution reached.

Wesleyanism chiefly served what may be designated as the lower middle and the lower classes.

At least, this is the judgment of careful

JOHN WESLEY

historians, though Overton, most sympathetic of all Church of England students to Wesleyanism, may be slightly influenced by the consciousness of what in England cannot help thinking of itself as a superior class.

The English workers came to the factories off the farms and out of the lower groups of the cities. They came without tools and would not have been skilled enough to use tools if they had had them. They had to tend machines which they could not themselves expect to own; to adjust their activities to the machines through an incredibly long day; to become almost slaves to their employers and to the machines.

With some this lot, unspeakable as it was, was better than the life they had left. Anyone who has paid any attention to the Parliamentary debates made necessary by Shaftesbury's agitation is aware that the millowners retorted with force upon the reformers that working conditions on the farms, including the estates of Shaftesbury's own family, were no better than in the mill towns.

However this may be, the proletarian class came to be not merely by influx from the farms and cities, but by increased birth rate in the class itself.

It seems terrible to say so, but in that class children were an economic asset, though one shudders at what this meant for the children.

Wesleyanism was adapted to the degree of religious receptiveness of this class.

Its manner of evangelism had in it enough of what Davenport has called the primitive traits to wake a response in souls that had never had a chance to rise much above the primitive; though the extreme features of nervous uproar had mostly ceased at the Methodist meetings, before the larger industrial changes set in.

Looking at the social effects of Methodism in the large, we sum up by saying that the effect on the industrial situation was threefold.

First, it ministered to the hard lot of the workers, helping them discover themselves, by lifting them above the sordidness of their condition and opening to them doors to a higher spiritual world.

After the more cruel features of the Revolution had been done away, or at least softened, multitudes of Methodists settled down into the industrial condition and became measurably content, though without much chance to get a surplus which would enable them to give their children a better start in the world than their parents had known.

Second, it fulfilled Wesley's prediction as to the outcome of the thrift and frugality and industry encouraged by the Wesleyan

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ideal and helped some workers to industrial leadership, which usually landed them in conservatism.

Adam Smith was, after 1776, preaching individualism with might and main and was being interpreted to mean that government should not interfere in economic processes at all; and Malthus was soon to be held up, mistakenly indeed, as the prophet of pessimism to the poor who had to increase in number up to the last attained pound of food, and of optimism to the employers who worked the poor to the last penny of profits they could make from them.

Many Methodists got into the class of the successful merchant or industrial leader.

The third effect was in arousing minds of the Shaftesbury type to the wrongs possible and actual under the new industrial order, though Shaftesbury would have to be accredited to the evangelical temper as a whole rather than to the Methodist branch.

Shaftesbury is the outstanding refutation of the old easygoing notion that, if a religious group will but preach the truth, the evil will disappear of itself. There is sound judgment here, if this refers to the creation of a general social atmosphere in which evils find it hard to thrive.

Evils, however, once established are put away only as some one puts them away.

Suppose Shaftesbury had himself heeded the doctrine that the gospel itself causes evils to disappear "of themselves." The world would have lost Shaftesbury, and the workers would have suffered on till some hater of industrial evil arose with a different theory and a more sensitive conscience and a more militant will than this easy notion of the gospel provides.

The century after Wesley brought out to the full light not the contradictions but the differences that for long existed side by side in the Wesleyan implications.

In the nineteenth century Methodism split into three branches: the main body, with its nucleus the "Legal Hundred," tending socially to a stolid conservatism, professing to be impartial between progressive and conservative but leaning to conservative; the others moving to a democracy of an extreme type. In the social struggles centering around Chartism, Legal-Hundred Methodism did not acquit itself with any especial credit, though individual members wrought valiantly.

There have always been Methodists, themselves interested in social advance, who have felt that Methodism as an organization should keep out of the social warfare, especially out of politics, its pulpit limiting itself to the proclamation of gospel ideals and leaving to other agencies, and to individuals, the grappling with specific

JOHN WESLEY

and detailed situations.

'This attitude is in itself sound enough, except that it is suspiciously welcome to the privileged classes.

Moreover, a Church as an organization has in itself a possibility of what may be called collective or corporate prophecy, owing to the fact that the body, which we may loosely call a social organism, can attain to an insight as its members work together which they may not attain as separate individuals. 'This advice to Methodists to abstain from social discussions, especially from political debates, is today fruitless.

The Methodists indeed do not often enough show themselves, in the mass, as advocating social advances which would bring larger social opportunity to men, preferring to range themselves on the side of causes which would limit the possibilities of the individuals going wrong in personal vices such as the drink and gambling habits. It would be a hardship, however, to Methodist bodies to ask them to refrain from expressing opinion in politics, as the term is ordinarily used.

Jabez Bunting was the outstanding leader of Methodism after John Wesley, with all Wesley's autocratic spirit and without his range of interests and graces of character.

If Bunting, however, had desired to defend his indifference, if not hostility, to democratic processes he could have said that he was but following in Wesley's footsteps.

Wesley never said or did anything undemocratic, in violating or ignoring the interests and welfare of the people. He knew that his society, if it was to be worth while at all, must keep close to the popular needs.

In studying the fundamental good of the masses Wesley was democratic.

It may be objected that he was too democratic in giving so much weight to the significance of what I have already referred to as the "'primitive traits" in men in times of religious excitement.

Whatever power he sought for and kept for himself, he sought and kept with the welfare of his followers in mind. Even though in state affairs he was a monarchist, he thought of and honored Parliament as the embodiment of the popular will.

He never stated his theory of monarchy consistently.

He was sure he knew what was best both for the preachers and for the people.

'To use the oft-quoted word of his, he admitted that Methodism was a despotism, but he saw no harm in that as long as he was the despot. Some apologists for Wesley have sought to make out that the class of people from whom the Methodists were drawn were not able to govern themselves. A defender of the American Methodist Episcopal system has told us that that system

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got its start and took unshakable hold because the American Methodists like to be governed.

In England Wesley was really heeding the people in not surrendering his power because they preferred having an authority tell them what to do, somewhat, I suppose, as Roman Catholics are said to want a pope to govern them. On this supposition Wesley surely cannot be regarded as having taught much self-government to his people in fifty years of control over them.

One test of leadership is the leader's ability to train his people to get along without his guidance.

In the local societies the Methodists gained that skill, because Wesley was away on incessant journeys.

The training in those small units was what counted, for Methodism and for the political and industrial democracy of the nineteenth century, though there are not many indications that Wesley gave much time to the consideration of such training and what would come out of it. It is said that the strength of Methodism was in the class meeting.

The strength of Chartist Clubs and of trade-unions was in the appropriation of the class meeting as a tool of a democracy that reached that ordinary man in whose power to rule Wesley did not have much confidence. It is, however, quite a tribute to Wesley that he was at last willing to leave his authority to the Legal Hundred, of course on the understanding that he was to select the hundred.

It is usually assumed that, when men become deeply religious, especially with an inner experience, their relations with their fellows are peace and concord.

It has not been so in Methodism, though the Methodist Movement has held together singularly well.

Wesley stamped something upon the soul of his followers that gave them a loyalty to their society at the same time that it left open the possibilities of disagreement.

It has amusing features—tinis picture of a society preaching perfect love and yet bristling with differences that do not suggest such love at all. Here, again, we have to reflect that we are dealing with a social organism thoroughly alive. We may wonder a little that Wesley did not see more clearly that for perfect individual experience we need a perfect environment.

Wesley would, no doubt, have met an objection like this with the avowal that the most important environment for human beings 1s other human beings, and that in our struggles to make other human beings better we ourselves travel along the path to perfection. The sound and not so sound in this position are alike obvious.

Before we leave this section, we enter an expression of deep gratitude at Wesley's freedom from anything like place-seeking. This

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may seem to the reader like a strange remark. Why should Wesley have sought place?

Well, place-seeking was an ugly fact in the life of hosts upon hosts of the English clergy in Wesley's day. The rector called on all of his friends, and pulled all of the wires within reach, and put himself under obligation to bishops and squires and court officials to get a parish better than the one he might have.

The custom was universal.

Of course this obligation to those who made possible the advancement of a rector, tied that rector's tongue against any socially prophetic speech, and is to this day measurably to blame for the notion that the preacher is to let social themes alone.

We may say that Wesley did not want a parish—and, of course, he did not—but in an age when it was the natural custom for priests of the Church of England to seek for favors, he sought none. We read with pain and shock of the persistency with which so sincere and honest a priest of the Church of England as Jonathan

Swift—and Swift was sincere and honestly devoted to the Church of England, whatever else he may have been—sought for place in the Church. There is not a thing suggestive of any of this in Wesley's Letters or Journal.

His father wrote a letter in a perfectly legitimate way, when the Fellowship of Lincoln College was open, and that was all.

If Wesley ever asked anything at the hands of those who had favors to bestow, there is no trace of the request.

From this point of view Macaulay's comparison of Wesley to Richelieu is not fortunate. Richelieu, no matter what the aims, always worked by appeal to desire for place, for his followers and himself.

He moved upon men from a knowledge of their weak spots.

Wesley did not seek for himself, and he appealed to them from the angle of the highest and best in them.

Wesley has been blamed for not encouraging his followers to see the importance of trade-union channels.

This blaming a leader for not following some other course than the one he took, and for not aiming at some other goal than he did, is among the most futile of historical procedures.

The Hammonds, of course, concede that religion can exert much influence in the cultural life of any society.

'They have done something to make vivid to us the state of the English Church at the time of Wesley.

They admit that, with noble exceptions here and there, that Church was doing incredibly little.

Now, would the Hammonds themselves judge that Wesley, reared and trained as he was, would have done better to abandon religious effort and throw himself into something like the trade-union effort?

Strictly speaking, there was not any such

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effort in his lifetime. From the tendency in the Church of England when Wesley came to the front, it could have been judged that by the end of the century there would have been no religious culture in the country whatever, if the country had only the English Church on which to depend. There probably never has been a time since the beginning of the Church when the question was more definitely whether there was to be any future for Christian religion at all or not than that when Wesley began his work.

As to that emphasis on otherworldliness of which the Hammonds complain: that was somewhat due to reaction. The Church of England was paying enough attention to this present world.

It was not considered in good form in that Church to speak of any other world than this. Wesley preached an otherworldliness that arrived at an effect here and now. Without any question the Hammonds believe in other worlds, other kingdoms than those of the daily round of the livelihood—the'kingdoms of truth and beauty, for example.

Wesley's preaching of the good was quite as important for laborers, for the fullness of their lives, as anything else that could be brought within their reach.

All of which we have elaborated in earlier sections of this book.

It may be as well to remind those who complain about Wesley's draining off resources that should have ultimately gone to the laborunion movement, that perhaps there was a middle ground between the English Church culture, and the religionless culture that England would have had, if the industrial population had been left to trade-unionism.

It was substantially the middle way that Wesley found—a religious idealism and practice that frankly faced the tragic in human life, that saw and proclaimed the surpassing dignity of men in an age when anybody who had any power over men forgot that those whom he was controlling were men.

There is another reason for the success of Wesley besides his power to draw men away from the feeling that they were an exploited class, something besides an unworthy indifference among Methodists to the sufferings of their fellows. Dealing with the laboring classes in such fashion as to describe them in two groups—those with a vision of the possibilities before themselves and their fellows, if they would but stand together in union, and those lured by the excitement of the Wesleyan Revival into visions of the other world into which they were to come, preferably by sudden, almost catastrophic conversion—is much too simple.

I think it is the Hammonds themselves who have said that the Wesleyan preaching drew with especial

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power upon the coal miners who worked alone and in peril, with tragedy always imminent.

It is possible that the Wesleyan preaching was meeting a need of the miners that membership in a labor organization might not touch.

Is it not significant that from the beginning of trade-unionism Methodists have been among the most forceful trade-unionists?

What I started to say was that the Christianity preached by Wesley came finally to make a middle way between the formal deadness of the Established Church and the lack of emphasis on religion in the labor movements of the time.

As we look at the experience of some of the more favored Englishmen—in the nineteenth century, highly endowed and trained—who gave up all religious belief because of their disgust with the Church, we cannot help feeling that the laborers were more fortunate than they. Of course these more favored rebels against the Church would not have been at home in the Wesleyan preaching places but, if they had only known it, they could have found there something of what they needed.

The Hammonds speak as if the wilder emotional outbursts were characteristic of Methodism all through the period when trade-unionism was coming to its power. By the time that movement was at all well developed the Methodist Revival had become very orderly indeed.

It does not make much difference as to the degree of emotional intensity with which a movement starts.

It has to settle into regular channels if it is to continue to count with social effectiveness. Wesley himself seemed satisfied with the progress his societies were making in the later years of his life. There was probably not more excitement in the Methodist meetings of the last decade of the eighteenth century than in the meetings of labor groups.

It is almost impossible to come to a satisfactory judgment in dealing with a problem like that now before us.

Looking back after all the years we see that what measure of actual deliverance from intolerable conditions the laboring men won they won chiefly by their own efforts.

"The Hammonds are right in classing the Methodist organization as such among the conservative forces in the early labor struggles; Methodism did not make an enviable record in those strenuous beginning days.

It is not fair, though, to hold Wesley himself responsible for all the shortcomings of the institution which he left behind him.

He was naturally conservative—never gave himself to a new method till he had to. Trade-

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unionism had not gone far enough in Wesley's day to be intelligible toa mind like his. He wasa surpassing organizer himself, but he did not have much place for any organization except his own.

Inasmuch as we are now treating of the continuing influence of Wesleyanism, we must admit that, so far as alignment went, Methodism for the half century following Wesley's death was on the side hostile or indifferent to labor. This is true, however, chiefly of the organization based on the Legal Hundred.

It is not true of what was known as Primitive Methodism.

All such judgments must be set in the context of the times.

The historian gives credit to the Evangelical Movement for the enthusiasm of certain outstanding leaders for humanitarian enterprises.

If one is tempted to suppose that Methodist leaders were alone in standing aloof from the organized efforts of the laboring men themselves, one should read some passages from the lips of evangelicals, who have been regarded as great friends of humanity, in the later days of the eighteenth and the earlier days of the nineteenth centuries. There was Hannah More, intent on the salvation of the souls of the poor, but so filled with class consciousness that it is a wonder that any self-respecting human being of any class but her own would listen to her for ten minutes.

She was strong for the piety that made for devotion to the established order. Shaftesbury was far and away the ablest and sincerest friend the laboring group had, but he looked on trade-unions with detestation. Hammond has written a biography of Shaftesbury—and a noble biography it is—but, if Hammond is to condemn Wesley and his followers for drawing off strength from the organized effort of laborers to help themselves, why not condemn Shaftesbury for efforts so exclusively legislative?

Students like the Hammonds are willing to concede that those who gave themselves to the Wesleyan meetings got something besides the direct teachings of the Wesleyans.

In their later writings the Hammonds make generous concessions to what came of Wesleyanism. Methodists got skill in conducting meetings and in addressing them.

Moreover, Wesley always laid stress on the need of reading. Many of the Methodists learned to read from their fellow

Methodists, especially from the leaders of the societies. Now once put the power to read within reach of a mind and there is no putting limits on what the reader may read, though Wesley tried hard enough to set such limits.

We have already remarked on these by-products of association

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in the Methodist societies—important by-products, and by-products are never to be despised.

'There are times when they are much more important than the main products.

It would be scant honor to the Wesleyan Movement, however, to limit its social significance to the by-products.

'The most powerful single force in directly curbing the inhumanities of the Industrial Revolution was Shaftesbury, and Shaftesbury thought of his power as arising from his evangelical experience. It would be interesting to see an attempt to fit Shaftesbury into the religious system of the English Church as it was before the Evangelical Revival aroused it, involving, as that system did, the least possible reference to God and toa righteousness beyond the merely proper and conventional morality. Shaftesbury believed thoroughly in the Christianity of the Evangelical Movement.

It was not any by-product which aroused his deep interest in the distresses of factory workers and chimney sweeps, but the Christian view of God and man.

So also with Wesleyanism.

'The founder had a sense of perspective. What Wesley taught was the worth of a man in the eyes of God.

'The man might be corrupt and degraded but he had an immeasurable value.

Of course there are those who always miss the manward reference in Christianity and speak as if anything which has to do with man at all, rather than with God, is not inherently Christian; but there are Christians who know the teaching and example of Christ.

In that teaching half of the all-inclusive commandment has to do with the neighbor. Who is the neighbor?

The man who happens to be at hand, whoever he may be. Anyone who misses this may be religious, but not after the Christian manner.

When men talk of the by-products of Christianity, they may have something in mind which is not by-product at all but direct resultant.

For example, a particular church may speak glibly about the brotherhood of man and make scant attempt to act upon that brotherhood.

A casual attendant upon its service, however, may get a vision, or at least a glimpse of what brotherhood implies and go forth to set it to work. That is not by-product but direct effect.

There are today powerful leaders outside the Church who got their basic conceptions inside the Church, or at least from the Church.

Their quarrel has been with the Church as an organization. Now, in Wesley's day his followers kept close to the main highways. They got these essentials to the attention of men.

They gave the fundamentals of the gospel a chance at classes who had never heard of the gospel.

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Professor L. T. Hobhouse, in an article on Christianity in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, has held that there is no system which has given nobler expression to the worth of man than has

Christianity, when that statement is stripped of the theological terminology in which Hobhouse himself had little or no interest.

Hobhouse seems to mean too that it does not rob Christianity's expression of its force to charge that organized Christianity itself has not lived up to its own teachings about mankind, for Christianity is a religion of ideas and spirit; that, whatever its own shortcomings, its handling of its ideas at all, gets them into men's minds.

The criticism of Christianity in history has not been so much with its ideals as with its practices. The treasure has been carried, sometimes kept, in an altogether earthen vessel. What Wesley did was to make real to thousands upon thousands of men the Christian belief in God and man.

His influence is not confined to those who were his professed followers, or to the incidental by-products of his organization, but reaches outward also to those who have sought to carry the idea of God and man into relations which the Church has ignored.

As I have already said, Lord Acton seemed to regard Wesley as one of the most significant figures in the history of the Church since the Reformation.

Acton wrote a standard work on the History of Freedom.

Now, Acton was too sincere, too devout, for anyone to make him appear anything but Christian.

Yet during the American Civil War he was against the North because he supported human slavery. He believed also in social classes and in the inferiority, if not the subjection, of the lower classes to their ''betters."

There is not any method of satisfactorily explaining such personal phenomena. We may remark in passing that half the American

Methodists, without ceasing their loyalty to Wesley, broke away from the other half because of the difference about slavery. When a leader announces a conception or a policy, there is no telling what those who call themselves by his name in the after years will do with what the leader bequeathed to them.

As long as the master is at hand the practical implications of his teaching may not be drawn; but after he is gone what seems like an inherent and inevitable logic tends to work itself out. One camp of followers may say that this is what our leader meant; that if he were living now in our places, this is what he would do; and another camp may take exactly an opposite view.

It would be a great mistake to imagine that Christianity is at any one period the final interpreter of what it is

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handing down to the oncoming generations.

It sometimes serves merely by passing an idea along, without having itself any adequate notion of its meaning.

Take the conception of God.

The transmission of the conception itself has been an incalculable service, though the interpretation of a particular time may have no lasting value after that time has passed.

So with the doctrine of man.

Wesley left an idea of the Christian man's life capable of indefinite expansion.

It has been said that the glory of man himself is that he is capable of being indefinitely improved.

Likewise, it is the glory of the idea of man that it can be indefinitely expanded.

Here again we fall afoul of the Hammonds.

I mention them so often because they are undeniably important for the study of the eighteenth century, and because they do see shortcomings of the Wesleyan Movement which are real enough to demand the attention of anyone trying to understand Methodism.

The Hammonds speak as if the convert to Methodism entered by his experience, no matter how intense that experience might be, into a narrow world.

The same criticism continues to the present day in the judgment that Wesleyanism has been a restricting and confining agency, giving a new lease of life to a Puritanism which ought to have been allowed to fall into atrophy, and that it has encouraged a foolish asceticism.

There is not a little validity in this charge.

Wesley did encourage an insistence upon trifles as a mark and test of Christian character.

Some of this insistence, if Wesley had made it merely a rule for his own life, would have been regarded as only a personal idiosyncrasy, a peculiarity more than offset by his own wholehearted absorption in his tasks.

He did, however, encourage his followers to courses which seemed to him like worthy self-denial, but which tended to loss by them of a wholesome perspective.

Wesley sought to make abstinence from all games a sign of righteousness, though he did except card-playing on the frankly affirmed reason that his mother played cards—a refreshing bit of information which makes

Susanna Wesley more human than any other single little stroke, and which gives us some slight feeling of satisfaction that any light relief was available in the dreadfully heavy tasks of the Wesley household.

Wesley's condemnation, however, extended to all feminine adornment, including ribbons.

This all had a serious side for Wesleyanism. It was of no consequence that Wesley gave himself to little odds and ends of self-

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denying exactness.

This was not a trial to him anyhow, for he enjoyed this treatment of himself, which was never serious enough to distract him from a central purpose which demanded the last ounce of his strength.

Not so, however, with scores of his followers, who needed anything rather than to have a narrowing influence set at work in their lives.

Wesley was traveling from end to end of England.

It would have been a psychological miracle if his own mind had become narrow, but the Methodists' lives were narrow to start with.

Under wrong examples they narrowed fast, demanding of themselves conduct which concerned itself with items always smaller and ever smaller.

This is a danger the more real, the more sincere the person involved, for the sincere conscience keeps asking itself if it has carried righteousness as far as it could.

"Have I done all I can?" is a maddening question, likely to get a good honest soul into direst confusion.

One tendency with the Wesleyan Revival was to permit the attention to get away from, or not to see, the wide social duties, and to fasten itself on insignificant pettinesses.

There is no need of trying to explain this away.

It was a tendency in Methodism which, first and last, did much harm.

Perhaps an explanation of all this is that such questions were not so likely to be divisive, as some of a larger order.

Wesley resembled most leaders at one point—he did not like trouble which would make divisions among his followers. He entered into controversy with extreme reluctance, refusing even to get into the Calvinistic battle until he had to. There is chance enough to land in controversy over questions having to do with the inner experiences, but they are not so divisive—except in debates over so-called perfection—as the more objective issues of social life.

In the actual direction which Methodism took in its emphasis on problems affecting the personal life, we must admit that it tended toa narrowing result.

At the risk of appearing over apologetic, may we insist again that judgment here should take account of the times in which Methodism arose. The social questions lay outside the reach of the ordinary intelligence.

If Wesley had been asked why he did not call the attention of his followers to social problems which ought to have filled all the horizon of the public mind, he might have replied that he had never thought of doing so. One of the immense surprises in reading his life are the vast stretches of useless or evil custom which he did not seem to notice. We are dealing here with the futile question to which I have so often referred: why did not this outstanding historic character do something other than what

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he did? There were many evils in Wesley's day, especially at the beginning of his career, which he did not see or which appeared as chiefly personal, the task being to turn individuals away from them: the grossness of the sports, such as bullbaiting and cockfighting; gambling and drunkenness.

Every historian of the period concedes the seriousness of the situation created by what can only be called popular bestiality. Wesley appears to have encouraged the experience which would, preferably by sudden crisis, break out of this life into another. So when the Hammonds refer to the intensity of the Methodist experience of conversion, and concede its worth, but declare that the experience was narrowing, the criticism has to be balanced by the remembrance of the conditions out of which the converts were "narrowed," a point on which the Hammonds and the Methodists do not agree.

How "narrowing" is it to pass out of drunkenness into sobriety?

Again, assuming that the Methodists did have much to say about a world other than this, what was there "narrowing" about such speech? Underneath all the crudeness of the utterances about heaven—and they were crude enough—such discussions supplied material in two directions: they brought dignity into the meaning of human life and they quickened the imagination.

This last contribution of the Methodist Revival has not received its fair share of recognition.

Granted that the imaginative deliverances of the early Methodist preachers were fantastic and grotesque, they did, nevertheless, open a door into an imaginative realm which ministered vitally to worthy human cravings.

The imaginative scenepainting of the early Methodists was not so raw as much present-day fiction and poetry which are pronounced powerful works of imagination.

It is odd that this should have taken place under the leadership of as practical a mind as Wesley, but take place it did.

As an extreme instance of the degree to which imaginative power can be developed in an illiterate mind, may I recall to the memory of some of my readers the sermons of John Jasper, a noted

Negro preacher of a half century and more ago.

"Brother Jasper," as he was called, was famous for his proof that the sun moves. The proof was laconic and direct enough: "There he is in the morning and there he is in the afternoon." Yet Jasper, on the imaginative side, was little short of genius. Some of his word pictures, as of the Egyptian plagues, had an emotional appeal beyond description.

Or, if we wish to look at something nearer our own times, think of

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the scenes and sentences of surpassing beauty in the play, Green Pastures.

It may be objected that the illustrations are not relevant because the Negro race is singularly rich in imaginative vigor; nevertheless, the Negro's imagination came to flower under preaching very similar to that of the early Methodists.

To be sure, the oldfashioned Methodist oratory is out of the mode now.

There are many of us still living, however, who can remember the flights of genuine eloquence of preachers who in turn got their inspiration from those who had actually worked under Wesley.

Moreover, it will not do to talk as if all the narrowness of the eighteenth century came from Methodists. Almost everything that called itself breadth was then tied up with an easy and complacent attitude toward life which pronounced it bad taste to look tragedy squarely in the face. There is also good ground for believing that much of this talk about Methodist narrowness came out of a class consciousness.

The possessing groups in England, whose instinct in such matters can be taken as a reasonably certain index to the truth, regarded the Methodists as potential if not actual disturbers of things as they were.

Upper-class arrogance had more than a little to do with spreading the opinion in England that the Methodists were a narrow-minded, indeed, an evil-minded, lot—an opinion which, in the same circles, has here and there persisted to the present hour. The continuance of such opinions long after the conditions that originally produced them have ceased, is one of the curious and neglected puzzles in human history.

Just glance over the following bit from Horace Walpole, written after Wesley had come to a nationwide fame.

Whitefield, A Rogue.

To the Rev. William Cole, Strawberry Hill, April 16, 1768.

. Lhope the Methodist, your neighbor, does not, like his patriarch, Whitefield, encourage the people to forge, murder, etc., in order to have the benefit of being converted at the gallows. That arch-rogue preached lately a funeral sermon on one Gibson, hanged for forgery, and told his audience, that he could assure them Gibson was now in heaven, and that another fellow, executed at the same time, had the happiness of touching Gibson's coat as he was turned off. As little as you and I agree about a hundred years ago, I don't desire a reign of fanatics.

Oxford has begun with these rascals and I hope Cambridge

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will wake.

I don't mean that I would have them persecuted, which is what they wish; but I would have the clergy fight them and ridicule them.

Adieu, dear Sir.

Yours ever.

No wonder that Wesley said in 1764, "I do not desire any intercourse with any person of quality in England."

Once more it must be remembered that Wesley held that the Methodists formed a society and not a'Church.

This accounts for much that is otherwise unintelligible.

'There were some phases of Christian service which he was not thinking of at all. He was the head of a society which men could take or leave as they pleased.

He could ask them to leave if he did not like their deeds or their words or their lives. They too could leave if they did not like him.

The organization had been created for the specific purpose of spreading scriptural holiness throughout the land, and for that alone.

Other tasks came along necessarily, but apart from the main purpose.

The massing of the opinion of the society against grave social evils might have seemed to Wesley a more serious obligation, if he had been founding a Church.

No, he was in his own mind set to found a society to cleanse the Church, and the nation indeed, but to doso by spreading scriptural holiness throughout the land.

Wesley definitely declared that he was not attempting even to give his followers a full religious service.

As late as 1789, he published in the famous Minutes: "But some may say: "Our own service is public worship.'

Yes; but not such as supersedes the Church service: it presupposes public prayer like the sermons at the University.

If it were designed to be instead of the Church service, it would be essentially defective.

For it seldom has the four grand parts of public prayer; deprecation, petition, intercession, and thanksgiving."

The above is an expression of Wesley's attitude throughout his career.

If Methodism was to be taken as a Church, then its work was narrowing at least to the extent of taking a part as if it were a whole.

The question as to whether Wesleyanism was narrowing or not takes a somewhat different shape as we look at Wesley himself.

He was broad in his charitable attitude toward the opinions of other men, broad in the range of his reading, and in his thinking.

He is to be blamed, however, for not allowing his followers to see

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more of his own breadth.

Much of it they could have seen for themselves: his wide knowledge of history and of what science there was.

He read where he pleased, but he does not seem to have encouraged his followers to do the same.

There was that chronic hankering to supervise the lives of those whom he thought of as committed tohim. One can imagine what he would have said if he had found one of his preachers reading Shakespeare and making notes upon the plays. Yet he did this himself, though his references to the "heathenish" poet are few.

In a letter in 1769 he spoke of Simple Master Shallow. That was the first Shakespearean reference in thirteen years.

In 1756 he had alluded to Goneril and Regan in Lear.

The truth seems to be that Wesley, like so many men who fashion rules for other men's conduct, asked his followers to give themselves to rules which meant little to himself. Think of this, written five years before his death: ''We cannot allow a baker to remain in our society if he sells bread on the Sabbath day. But if he only bakes pies, we do not exclude him."

I wonder if the reason was that to taste best a pie must be eaten on the day it is cooked.

He never seemed to realize how full his own life was.

He found an absorbed delight in complete service to his cause.

He thought of nothing else.

He went from one society to another, preaching possibly ten times or more a week.

When he left a society, he did not leave a group living as full lives as himself, but persons who had to go back to the humdrum and drudgery of daily work. To use the current psychological term: he was himself finding abundant means for "expressing" himself.

He rode his four thousand or forty-five hundred miles a year from one end of England to the other. There was no need of talking as if this were hardship to him, for he enjoyed it. Now, when a man like this begins to declaim against the little things in other people's lives which could not possibly mean anything to him, he cannot escape the charge of acting, at least in these respects, as a narrowing force.

What did "personal adorn- -ments' mean to Wesley?

It was to be noted, however, that he took most scrupulous care of his personal appearance, which was altogether to the good.

A man who was thus scrupulous, however, would have done better not to say so much about ribbons and ruffles as signs of sin. He was himself living a life of supreme happiness in leading the Methodists—partly because he was leading.

Perhaps we shall have to come back to praise Wesley for leav-

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ing behind him an emphasis for which both he and his followers have been blamed, or at least discounted, namely, the stress on the quantitative spread of the kingdom of God, the attempt to reach vast numbers.

It is only recently that adequate regard has been paid to the popularizer of knowledge.

Democracy means government by discussion, discussion by masses of people.

If the discussion is to be of any value, it must be based on sound knowledge. 'The sound knowledge is at least at the outset the discovery of individuals. Agassiz once said that the easiest scientific statement to make is that to scientists; the next hardest that to the laity; the hardest of all, that to children.

One of the present-day movements which promise most for the welfare of democracy is the attempt to bring scientific knowledge down to the ordinary understanding.

If democracy is to endure, it must be on the basis of knowing the facts; and if the people are to know the facts, they must be able to grasp the facts, which means that the facts must be put in graspable form.

One of the achievements of our time has been the skill with which the results of science have been put within the reach of the plain man of the street, and shop, and field. A degree of success has been won even in popularizing mathematics.

So it has been also in the appreciation of all forms of art.

I repeat that this is at last coming to recognition.

For a long time the higher forms of knowledge and art were supposed to be almost the sacred reserved possession of the privileged groups.

John Wesley as a popularizer of knowledge I have already discussed.

It remains to add a word about his making religion a possession of the English people.

This is implied in his oft-quoted plan: to spread scriptural holiness through the land.

John Wesley had a distinctively and specifically religious task to perform every day and all the day. He gave all his time to such service. Speaking of marriage, he declared that he would not think of marrying if doing so meant traveling one mile less or preaching a single sermon fewer during the year. Now, this notion itself puts

Wesley's experience outside the normal. When the pursuit of perfection is stated in such terms that it involves living all the day with a conscious religious purpose, then one of two things becomes necessary.

'The life must be wholly given to specific religious tasks or the daily secular work must be such that it can all be done as unto the Lord, which implies an approach to perfection in the nature of the work itself.

Now, the daily work of mankind has

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never been of this order, unless it has been of a simple farm type, or a field which has called forth the constant opposition and attack of the Christians.

Daily work has not often been conceived of thus. Men have taken it as something to which to adjust themselves as best they might.

To reach any numerous groups of followers under such conditions it has been necessary so to phrase and enforce religion as to make it readily intelligible and sternly arresting.

This Wesley succeeded to an extraordinary degree in doing.

He kept his own preaching and that of his preachers close to a center, with not much chance for deviation.

As we read his Journal and Letters, we feel as if we were almost in the presence of one of the impersonal natural forces, in the days before man appeared on the earth, which kept the unfolding forms close to type and crowded out any departure from that mold.

Holding up the religious experience which was characteristic of Methodism, Wesley made the experience of seekers tend toward that typical form.

It is fortunate that the scientific method has been used so fruitfully in these recent years upon the social influence of Wesley.

There was general recognition of the larger influence of Wesley by the older historians like Macaulay and John Richard Green for a long time, but there has been of recent years most important work done by Miss MacArthur on the economic ethics of Wesley, by Eric

M. North on early Methodist philanthropy, by Maldwyn Edwards on Wesley and the eighteenth century, by W. J. Warner on Wesley and the Industrial Revolution, and by E. R. Taylor on Methodism in politics.

These authors have all worked more closely and realistically than the earlier writers, and with even deeper sympathy.

Considerable effort has been expended to show the significance of Wesley for the literary life of the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Probably as important a service as any rendered in this field was to increase the size of the reading public, by making the less favored groups readers of good books, and by making the books cheap enough for their financial reach.

As to the Wesley style, its simplicity, directness, and force were communicable.

At least fifty of Wesley's preachers were masters of terse and idiomatic English.

Yet in this rather technical sphere of style the English of the eighteenth century was the creation and tool of more than a few giants—Swift, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Burke.

For some of these Wesley did not seem to have any enthusiastic appreciation.

What does seem clear is that the Wesley emphasis on spiritual

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realities played its part in the movement of the latter eighteenth and earlier nineteenth century toward romanticism.

Romanticism is proverbially hard to define. We usually attempt to describe it, or we say that we know it when we see it. Whatever our definition, we know that it deals more with the human than with the impersonal, with the idealistic than with what we vaguely call the realistic, with the imaginative rather than with the matter of fact.

John Wesley was profoundly interested in human values, but he was not the only great writer of his century thus interested.

Gray's "Elegy" dealt with a plowman, and Goldsmith, who was rather contemptuous of Methodism, spoke of the times in which wealth accumulated and men decayed.

Wesley's thinking was personal but also institutional, realistic as well as spiritual, administrative as well as absorbed in the inner life, more deeply and highly ethical than most of the romanticists. Nevertheless it is fair to count Wesley among those vital, enkindling, enlightening forces which so changed the atmosphere of his time as to make it hospitable to Wordsworth and Burns and Dickens, when they came.

It is absurd to say that these romanticist geniuses would not have come at all if it had not been for Wesley, but without Wesley they might not have come so soon, or have wrought so powerfully for the release of the higher human possibilities.

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